RE: [Groff] Accents in output

[Ted Harding]

On 28-Jan-04 MJ Ray wrote:
> This is an old chestnut, but I can't figure the answer out from the
> list archives.
> 
> How do I get accented characters in my output?
> 
> I'm particularly interested in c, g, h, j and s with circumflex
> (ĉĝĥĵŝ), and u with breve (ŭ). I understand that I can't enter
> UTF-8 at present, but neither \(c^ or \[^c] works for me. For that
> matter, nor does \[^a].

It has just struck me that you are probably writing in Esperanto here
(iso-8859-3 encoding).

Rather than go through the mechanisms I described earlier to construct
your composite glyphs out of standard characters and accents, you
might do better to install a proper Esperanto PostScript (Type 1)
font. This would certainly work better for awkard ones like jcircumflex.
I've done a bit of a web search, and there seems to be quite a few of
these out there, some of which look as though they may be freely
available. However, I'm no expert on Esperanto fonts and won't even
think of recommending anything!

Once you've got a font installed into groff, you can define your own
names for the characters using the .char request (so you can call them,
as before, \[c^], \[g^], \[h^], \[j^], \[ub], ... ), on the lines
of

.char \[c^] \N'nnn'

(where nnn is the number of the character's position in the PS encoding
vector for that font file).

This definition presumes that you will be in an "Esperanto font" when
calling for \[c^]. Alternatively, you can switch into Experanto font
on the fly with

.char \[C^] \f[EF]\N'nnn'\fP

(where EF is the name you have given to your esperanto font).
However, there are several complications in doing it this way, which
have to do with what font you were using when you wanted to use \[c^]
-- you will want the fonts to match up after the switch.

There are many issues arising when you install extra fonts which have
to do with how you would prefer to use them. Keep in touch if you
want to follow this up.

Best wishes,
Ted.


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Date: 29-Jan-04                                       Time: 11:12:24
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