Re: [Groff] grops and Unicode, Unicode in general.

[Erich Hoffmann]

Hello Wartan.

Am Samstag, 14. Mai 2005 22:50 schrieb Wartan Hachaturow:
> What is the current status regarding the denoted combination?
> I would really like to have cyrillic working out-of-the-box (together with
> other scripts, but Russian cyrillic worries me most :) with (at least)
> PostScript output.

You can create those fonts yourself.  I did that once, and my russian is
even worse than my groff ;) but it works and really isn't that
difficult.  Here ist how I did it:

For PS-Output you need a russian *.afm file.  On my Slackware 10.1
I have fcyr.afm and fcyri.afm in the /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts/
directory. Then I touched an empty 0.map and did

 [afmtodit fcyr.afm 0.map CYR_0].

In the resulting CYR_0 you have entries like these:

u006A 560,476,1 1 106 j
u006B 486,476,1 1 107 k
u006C 493,478,3 1 108 l

I deleted the [u00]'s so that it is only 6A, 6B, 6C and then I could
insert the characters with \(6A, \(6C etc.  after mapping the CYR_0
to a font position with the .fp request.  Now I tried out the letters
after guess-and-error and mapped them to ascii.  For DVI-output the
procedure is similiar.  On my box I have wncyr, wncyi and wncyb in
/usr/share/texmf/fonts/tfm/ams/cyrillic/ as *.tfm-files.  You get a
devdvi - font file after touching a 0.map with

 [tfmtodit wncyr10.tfm 0.map CYR_0]

This CYR_0 has empty entries, so again I did a guess-and-error trial
to see which character is which.  Afmtodit and tfmtodit are documented
as man pages and in the info files.

[...]
> something like UTF-8 and see an appropriate output with no special efforts.
> Are there any efforts in this direction that I could (probably) join? :)

I'd be interested in those efforts too; up to now I just played
with it.  I don't know whether this method works if you have no
ghostscript or tex fonts installed on your system.  Perhaps one of
the experienced has time to give advice how to do that in a better way.

Best,

erich