Hi folks, I just updated my computer to Fedora 29, and downloaded the latest version of groff (1.22.4). When I ran configure, it couldn't find the URW++ fonts. Turned out I hadn't installed them. D'oh! Installed them, but configure still couldn't find them. I added the --with-urw-fonts-dir option, but configure _still_ couldn't find them. It took me some digging (and pulling out what little hair I have left), but I found a couple of problems:
1) URW++ has changed their file names to something human-readable, instead of the nigh-password-worthy names they used to use. 2) URW++ no longer ships *.pfb files in their base35 fonts package. Insead, they ship *.otf, *.afm, and *.t1 files. configure looks in the urw-base35 fonts directory ("/usr/share/fonts/urw-base35" in Fedora) for "a010013l.pfb", which is now "URWGothic-Book.pfb", to determine if the URW++ fonts are there. Naturally, since the file didn't exist, it decided that there weren't any fonts to install. Thinking I could work around the problem, I used FontForge to create .pfb files out of the .otf files. Then I created symbolic links to the apropriate old-style file names and ran configure. Success! Huzzah! Alas, it was too soon to cheer. When I ran make, BuildFoundries couldn't build the groff fonts, and I don't know why. The error message is: "BuildFoundries: warning: line 77: Failed to create groff font 'U-AB' by running afmtodit" where the line number increments by one for each groff font it can't build. At this point I'm lost. I am not a Perl programmer, so I don't know what BuildFoundries is actually doing. There is probably something very simple going worng, but I don't know where to look. Anyway, I gave up on groff installing the fonts automatically and used Peter Schaffter's "install-fonts.sh" script. Worked like a charm (thanks Peter!). So I installed several other typeface families (Linux Libertine and TeX Gyre, among others). All was well, or so I thought. I did some work on a project file and ran it through groff (via pdfmom) to build a PDF. It seemed to have worked until I looked more closely. Much to my surprise, the ASCII single-quote character "'" which is supposed to be rendered as a typographic single-quote, was still coming out as a typewriter single-quote. I tried changing font families and found something very odd. The fonts that groff installed work as expected. The ones I installed have the problem. I have no idea why. I can work around the problem by adding a ".tr '\[cq]" line to the source file. Still, I'd like to know where things went wrong so that I can fix it. Does anyone have any suggestions? Right now I have no idea where to start looking. --Dale P.S. What's a .t1 file? My google-fu failed me; all I could find was a reference to "male MRI" files. Funny, I didn't know that MRI files had gender. At least, nobody said anything about it when my MRIs were taken. -- "And finally, _thinking_ is an exercise to which all too few brains are accustomed." --E.E. "Doc" Smith, _First Lensman_