Re: [Groff] unicode support - where to compose?

[Larry Kollar]

Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> > ... how gtroff figures out glyph widths ...
>
> gtroff reads the metric files (in the devXXX directories) for the
> given device and positions the glyphs accordingly.  The postprocessor
> just translates the intermediate output file into device-specific
> data -- no need to access the glyph metrics again.

Aha... that makes sense now.

> > It would be nice to have access to all the TrueType and PostScript
> > fonts installed on the system without having to build metric files
> > and so forth.
>
> This is virtually impossible IMHO.  You need a tight integration
> between groff and the OS, making it highly system-specific.

I don't know about that. Instead of reading the groff metrics,
gtroff could perhaps query the system for metrics. Grops might
not even have to do anything different. It might even be possible
to make the source (mostly) backward-compatible by associating
a groff-style font name with a real font name (e.g. TB with
DejaVuSerif-Bold); versions that don't support the request would
fall back to Times-Bold.

The code to get the metrics would obviously be system-specific,
and the Free operating systems would have to go even further
and have WM-specific code (say, for Gnome or KDE)... which
would be a problem when moving around.


> > If I were to poke at this, where would I start?
>
> In case you really want to invest some time I suggest that you think
> about an improved `make install' (or `make font-install') which checks
> the system for fonts and calls FontForge, afmtodit, etc., to convert
> them to something groff can understand (this is, PFA+AFM).  Today,
> disk space is abundant, and fonts are rather small, so this is the
> route to go I believe.

Hm. I see the logic in that. It would certainly be a lot easier to do,
given the currently amorphous state of font management on the
Free OSes. FontForge would be a good choice of conversion
utilities since it runs on the same platforms as groff does. But instead
of driving it through make, I think a separate utility might be a better
route -- each user will have to tell the converter *where* to find the
fonts, because they live in different directories on each OS (and in
the case of MacOSX, there are two system-wide font directories
and each user can have his/her own set of fonts as well).

I'll look into this a bit later. I'm currently setting up some  
infrastructure
for UTP Revisited so those who are interested can get started soon.

--
Larry Kollar     k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival"
http://home.alltel.net/kollar/utp/