groff
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [Groff] using Linux Libertine with groff


From: Dave Kemper
Subject: Re: [Groff] using Linux Libertine with groff
Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2013 06:17:01 -0600

> Yes, it appears that groff decomposes the "u..." characters,
> recognizes the five as known ligatures, but then outputs the
> individual characters because the font description file doesn't
> contain the corresponding groff names "ff", "Fi", "Fl", etc.,
> even though it contains the composite unicode characters.

This seems to me an odd thing for groff to do.  For plain text, I can
see why one would want groff to take input character combinations that
can be rendered as ligatures and transform them thus.  But if the user
explicitly gives groff a composite character that's defined in the font
description file, it doesn't seem that trying to second-guess what the
user *really* meant is the right thing to do.

More problematically, this behavior remains the same even if I turn
ligatures off (via .lg 0).  With ligatures off, groff has no reason to
handle composite characters that translate into ligatures it knows any
differently from composite characters that translate into ligatures it
doesn't know.  In this mode, it should simply output the glyph of every
character exactly as encountered in the input.  I feel that this goes
beyond the realm of curious behavior and into the realm of being a bug.

I confess to not being an expert in this area, so perhaps there is
some rationale for this behavior that I'm overlooking.  But there does
seem to be some sort of flaw when groff makes it impossible to access
by name certain glyphs named in the font description file.  (The \N''
syntax does work, but this of course defeats kerning of these characters.)



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]