Hi Ian, thanks for your attention to the groff manual! On 3/7/24, ropers <rop...@gmail.com> wrote: > "latin1" sounds awfully ISO-8859-1ish, and (I fear) not very much like > the Latin-1 Supplement Unicode block
Correct. Since there are two different things that include "Latin-1" in their name, perhaps this wording could be be more explicit. On the other hand, the context is input encodings, and a Unicode block is not itself an input encoding. > which makes me wonder if Current Year's > groff/troff itself (absent pre-piped converters) can at all handle > multi-byte character sets in general, or UTF-8 in particular. It cannot. This is a longstanding wishlist item: "improving Unicode support" was put into the Groff Mission Statement when it was drafted 10 years ago. Ten years before that, groff's then-maintainer posted to this list: "Volunteers are highly welcome to extend groff from 8bit to 32bit input characters" (http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2004-05/msg00026.html). But this is a monumental task, and one groff developer has written of some of its difficulties (http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?40720#comment4). In short, it's not for lack of desire that groff lacks this feature. With any luck, you'll follow the Branden Track, where you start off by poking a little at groff's documentation and are soon hacking away at the code base. You might be the volunteer Werner asked for 20 years ago ;-) > Also, this sounds a lot like Current Year's groff(1) even WITH > pipe-connected UTF-8 converters/drivers (which may be what's referred > to at the bottom of that section) couldn't actually support anything > like, say, Cyrillic or katakana or whatever, Groff added Cyrillic support last year (http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?63076). It includes some CJK support but expanding this is an ongoing project (http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62830). If you have expertise in this realm and can address some of the outstanding questions in that ticket, please chime in. Groff ships no fonts that include glyphs for these languages, but installing fonts is fairly straightforward today with install-font.sh (see the bottom of http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-06.html). Making this even easier is also an ongoing project (http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?60930).
