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]\[u03BD] \[u1F00]\[u03C1]\[u03C7]\[u1FC7] \[u1F26]\[u03BD] \[u1F41] \[u03BB]\[u03CC]\[u03B3]\[u03BF]\[u03C2], \[u03BA]\[u03B1]\[u1F76] \[u1F41] \[u03BB]\[u03CC]\[u03B3]\[u03BF]\[u03C2] \[u1F26]\[u03BD] \[u03C0]\[u03C1]\[u1F78]\[u03C2] \[u03C4]\[u1F78]\[u03BD] \[u03B8]\[u03B5]\[u03CC]\[u03BD], \[u03BA]\[u03B1]\[u1F76] \[u03B8]\[u03B5]\[u1F78]\[u03C2u] \[u1F26]\[u03BD] \[u1F41] \[u03BB]\[u03CC]\[u03B3]\[u03BF]\[u03C2]. 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: troff: rubbish.ms:2: warning: can't find special character 'u03B5_0313' troff: rubbish.ms:2: warning: can't find special character 'u03B1_0313' troff: rubbish.ms:2: warning: can't find special character 'u03B7_0342_0345' troff: rubbish.ms:2: warning: can't find special character 'u03B7_0313_0342' troff: rubbish.ms:2: warning: can't find special character 'u03BF_0314' troff: rubbish.ms:2: warning: can't find special character 'u03BF_0301' troff: rubbish.ms:2: warning: can't find special character 'u03B9_0300' troff: rubbish.ms:2: warning: can't find special character 'u03BF_0300' 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? Thanks very much - Robert. -- Robert Goulding Director, John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values; Director, Program in History and Philosophy of Science; Assoc. Professor, Program of Liberal Studies, Fellow, Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame.