Re: [Groff] Re: unicode support, part 14: unicode fonts

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 08:14:14AM +0200, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> > For Unicode fonts (which ought to be increasingly the norm), the
> > proposal to write out all glyph properties in the font file seems
> > odd; as far as I understand the point of Bruno's Unicode fonts
> > versus enumerated fonts is to avoid the need to write out properties
> > in font files which are really properties of the Unicode code
> > points.  Can these properties not be autogenerated from
> > UnicodeData.txt (and others, e.g.  EastAsianWidth.txt) and used
> > automatically for all Unicode fonts?  Glyph classes would then be
> > useful for efficient internal storage, but there would be no urgent
> > need to represent them in the font files.
> 
> Please bear in mind that groff, similar to TeX, don't store character
> information; everything is related to glyphs -- I won't accept a
> solution which works for a particular device only.  For example, take
> a Japanese PS font; you can't safely assume that the font's
> `full-width' characters are full-width at all because this gives poor
> typographical output.

Hmm, OK, I was unaware of that detail. Thanks.

> > (In addition, the Debian patches also create an "ascii8" device,
> > which is a curious little hack that effectively passes through
> > characters encoded according to the current locale - so if the input
> > to ascii8 is ISO-8859-2, then you get ISO-8859-2 output.  At
> > present, man uses this device for Czech, Croatian, Hungarian,
> > Polish, Russian, Slovak, and Turkish.  Obviously this device is
> > typographically dubious at best, so I'll replace it by use of
> > preconv/soelim/whatever and an iconv postprocessing step;
> > latin2.tmac and latin5.tmac would work as well but those appear to
> > be largely superseded by preconv.)
> 
> latin2.tmac and friends are *not* superseded, you need them for proper
> hyphenation.  Have a look at my recent answer to a mail called `koi8-r
> hyphenation revisited'.

Ah, I forgot about hyphenation. Thanks.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden