Re: [Groff] German Umlaute, ISO-8859-1, postscript.

[Bruno Hertz]

On Sun, 2004-05-16 at 16:58, Alejandro Lopez-Valencia wrote:

> Hi Bruno,
> 
> You forgot to mention very important details, such as: (1) You operating 
> system (no, saying "Linux" is not enough, go to <http://linuxiso.org/> to 
> see what I mean :-); (2) the version of your vi: there are 2 different open 
> source versions of vi, 4 different open source clones out there, and a 
> different closed source version for each version of vendor UNIX out there. 
> I'm not counting three different ELISP emulations that run in emacs :-); 
> (3) Gnome is a moving target, what Gnome/GTK versions?. I'm not psychic, I 
> just noticed you use Ximian Evolution...
> 
> If using vim (most probable bet is using some Linux distribution), you will 
> have far better luck setting the actual file encoding yourself and making 
> sure the file is written with *that* encoding. Type ':h mbyte.txt' without 
> the quotes for the whole story. As well, using modelines to set the file 
> character set is very useful.
> 

Alejandro

thanks for your reply. First to your questions:

* OS is RedHat Linux 9
* groff version is 1.18.1
* I use basically this vi
  http://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/
  which is a port of the original one to linux, i.e. without
  fancy extensions.

That vi version though as well as vim take into account LANG
resp. LC_CTYPE.

However, I guess I did confuse something. I.e. I thought my
settings would produce 8bit extended chars in vi/vim/etc.
but actually the umlauts, when entered, are stored as 2byte
characters.

Still the question maintains, wether it's one or two bytes,
since my vi and vim and emacs etc. interpret those 2 byte
sequences correctly, i.e. according to LANG/LC_CTYPE,
why doesn't groff when producing postscript output?

Obviously, groff knows what to do with those bytes when given
the switch -Tlatin1. But with -Tps, the environment doesn't
seem to be taken into account. Maybe it needs an extra switch?
Or a macro included? It may seem obvious to you, but I'm really
stuck here ...

Bruno