Re: Question about Unicode Greek

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Hello.

Robert Goulding wrote in
 <CACE7msuTMpqMaMg8c9m1AeBJOt1DtwFQtd0f_vp10i8vZLvjTw@mail.gmail.com>:
 |I've been away from groff for a long time; I think the last time I used it,
 |there was no Unicode support at all. Now I'm interested in using it as a
 |filter from markdown, through pandoc to groff to pdf.
 |
 |This is working well for me, except for a handful of files in which I use
 |Greek with accents. I understand that groff doesn't have characters for
 |accented Greek characters, and I'm willing to do the work to add them, I'm
 |just trying to understand what's involved.
 |
 |So, here is a tiny document with some Greek in it:
 |
 |.LP
 |ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος
 |
 |When I run this through preconv, I get the following:
 |
 |.lf 1 rubbish.ms
 |.LP
 |\[u1F10][...]
 |
 |with all of the Unicode characters turned into the correct code numbers.
 |When I run this through groff -ms -Tps I get the following errors:
 ...
 |This is what is puzzling me. The very first letter, ἐ, is correctly given
 |its unicode description \[u1F10] by preconv; but then troff seems to
 |decompose it into \[u03B5] which is ε and \[u0313] which is ̓ . So, if I
 |wanted to tell groff how to print ἐ, how do I go about it, when there seem
 |to be two internal representations?

It seems the groff source repository contains the necessary update
in the afmtodit tables to include this character for non per-se
Unicode aware output devices.  A new release will ship it thus.
You could try to update the %AGL_to_unicode hash in
/usr/bin/afmtodit of your installed groff accordingly, too.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)