Path: utzoo!telly!eci386!ecicrl!clewis From: clewis@ecicrl.UUCP (Chris Lewis) Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Re: troff postprocessors for ISO 8859 characters Message-ID: <1038@ecicrl.UUCP> Date: 2 Jan 91 23:49:17 GMT References: <1990Dec28.195703.2749@cbnewsl.att.com> Reply-To: clewis@ecicrl.UUCP (Chris Lewis) Organization: Elegant Communications Inc., Ottawa, Canada Lines: 44 In article jjc@jclark.UUCP (James Clark) writes: >Groff has a composite character feature which helps with using ISO >8859/1 with a device that doesn't have all the ISO 8859/1 characters. >For example, suppose you want to be able to input an `a' circumflex >using ISO 8859/1 (`a' circumflex has code 0342), and suppose you have >a device which has the letter `a' and has a circumflex accent, but >doesn't have an `a' circumflex as a single character. Assuming `\*^' >has been defined appropriately, you just have to do: So does psroff. In fact, I'd like to include the following plea to Nils-Peter for consideration in DWB 3.2: It is not necessary to limit the emit sequence in the ditroff width table files to be just one character. It would be advantageous to permit the fourth field in the width table to consist of any arbitrary sequence of characters, including backslash escape sequences (octal, maybe even hex ala 1003.1 string definitions). In this way, people can produce composite characters for mundane things (such as O overstrike c) that a printer doesn't support, as well as Latin-1 extensions on printers that are short the special glyphs, and even get at characters you call for by name (the characters not in the default postscript encoding vectors). Psroff has this feature: embedded in the built-in emit sequences (after all, CAT troff can't extend it's basic character set) plus translation override facilities, with multiple char codes, and indeed, invocations of Postscript drawing routines or glyph-backspace-glyph sequences etc. >.char \342 a\\*^ This feature is going to be appearing in Psroff soon. As another plea, in the extremely unlikely event that somebody does get to diddle SVR4 CAT Troff and sees this posting, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE implement "\!". This directive should simply pump it's arguments out *in* the CAT code stream, prefixing it with an unused CAT code (eg: 'M') and terminated with a null or newline. That would make my life complete. [I enjoy the simple life ;-)] -- Chris Lewis, Phone: (613) 832-0541 UUCP: uunet!utai!lsuc!ecicrl!clewis Moderator of the Ferret Mailing List (ferret-request@eci386) Psroff mailing list (psroff-request@eci386)