First impressions: strange groff default font behaviour after system upgrade

[Oliver Corff]

Dear All,

today I upgraded my system from Fedora 38 to Fedora 39 which has the
appreciated side-effect that groff 1.23.0 is finally installed by default.

I tested the new installation. As was to be expected, groffer was gone
(I liked it for q&d test runs of code snippets, so I actually miss it. I
wrote a small shell script to which calls groff and the pdf viewer, so
that is fair enough as a substitute).

However, I was eager to see whether anything has changed on the font side.

Under an out-of-the-box setup of my previous groff-1.22.4 installation
(delivered with Fedora 38), I could not print the characters  \[<=] and
\[>=]. Little crossed boxes appeared instead. My workaround then was

.char ≤ \o'<_'

which looks close enough to the glyph displayed by my system font for
the terminal, and goes well with a document typeset in Helvetica.

On the other hand, Greek symbols for math and statistics, like Chi
Square, could be entered in the file as χ\~² and appeared quite as
expected. Without the spacing command, the north-east end of χ ends up
in the hook of the ².

Enter groff 1.23.0. I compiled the same file again (a translation which
I had finished just this morning, not knowing what an escape I had*),
and alas! things took an unexpected course. First I looked for the
appearance of  ≤ and was astonished to see that not only was it
invisible, it was truly invisible as no placeholder box appeared; blank
space was there, at least. Then I noticed strange holes in the text ---
the Greek letters did not show up either. Again, no placeholder box,
just white space.

So, this is a brand-new Fedora 39 installation with groff version
1.23.0, the URW fonts being found in /usr/share/fons/urw-base35/.

My first question: Is this new behaviour intended?

If so, what I am I supposed to do?

If not, what kind of tests and diagnostics should I conduct?

If I compile a minimal ms document like

.PP
1≤2

I can copy and paste the white space between 1 and 2 from the resulting
pdf document, and lo and behold, it is a "≤" !

And, as a side-note, there is a typo in refer(1), right in the first
line(2) of ther first contiguous paragraph: "a preprocessor that
prepares bibilographic citations".

As a second side-note, I am willing to learn. I discovered the
BUG-REPORT instruction. So for my next observation, I'll go to Savannah.

Thank you a lot,

Best regards,

Oliver.

* I had to meet a deadline this morning, handing in my work just so-so
in time.

--
Dr. Oliver Corff
Wittelsbacherstr. 5A
10707 Berlin
GERMANY
Tel.: +49-30-85727260
mailto:oliver.corff@email.de