Re: [Heirloom] Using the Symbola font in Heirloom troff

[T. Kurt Bond]

In Emacs M-x describe-coding-system tells me the coding system for saving
the buffer is utf-8-unix.  I don't have any LC_* environment variables set,
but LANG=en_US.UTF-8.

I'm not very knowledgeable about the insides of Unicode fonts,
unfortunately.

On Tue, Aug 4, 2020 at 4:27 PM Richard Morse <pukku@mac.com> wrote:

> Huh. I’m afraid I’m out of my depth then; you might check and see if your
> LC_* environment variables are set to something incompatible with utf-8
> (or, maybe, check and make sure the file in UTF-8, not UCS-16 or something
> if you’re on Windows), but hopefully someone with more experience and
> knowledge will speak up…
>
> Ricky
>
> > On Aug 4, 2020, at 3:59 PM, T. Kurt Bond <tkurtbond@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > And if I add "and explicit unicode character reference \U'1F0A1'" to the
> > file, that character doesn't show up either.
> >
> > On Tue, Aug 4, 2020 at 2:47 PM Richard Morse <pukku@mac.com> wrote:
> >
> >> According to the Heirloom Troff manual, I think that you cannot just
> >> insert Unicode characters (although maybe if your LC* environment
> variables
> >> are set correctly, you can?). It says:
> >>
> >>> Both nroff and troff allow references to specific Unicode characters
> >> with the \U'X' escape sequence;
> >>> it causes the character at position U+X to be printed (X is a
> >> hexadecimal number). For troff,
> >>> it is required that this character is available in one of the fonts
> >> mounted at this point.
> >>> As an example, \U'20AC' prints the Euro character €. When register .g
> is
> >> set to 1 Unicode
> >>> characters can also be accessed with \[uXXXX] where XXXX is a four
> digit
> >> hexadecimal number.
> >>
> >> So I think you would need to use `\U'1F0A1'` for the character to show
> up?
> >>
> >> Ricky
> >>
> >>
> >>> On Aug 4, 2020, at 12:28 PM, T. Kurt Bond <tkurtbond@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> (The heirloom-doctools README.md
> >>> <https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-doctools/blob/master/README.md>
> >> says
> >>> to ask Heirloom doctools questions on this list.)
> >>>
> >>> I'd like to use the Symbola font in Heirloom troff.   I tried the
> >> following:
> >>>
> >>> .do xflag 3
> >>> .\" fp 5 Optima Optima-Regular ttf
> >>> .fp 5 Symbola Symbola otf
> >>> .LP
> >>> Here is some normal text.
> >>> .\" PLAYING CARD ACE OF SPACES is Unicode 0x1F0A1
> >>> .ft Symbola
> >>> 🂡 And some normal text. ❊
> >>> .ft P
> >>> More normal text.
> >>>
> >>> That's a literal PLAYING CARD ACE OF SPADES Unicode character at the
> >> start
> >>> of the line between the two .ft requests.  That character does not show
> >> up
> >>> in the troff output, even through the EIGHT TEARDROP-SPOKED PROPELLER
> >>> ASTERISK Unicode character at the end of the line *does* show up,
> >>> as CPSuni274A where the CPS<name> outputs the character of that name.
> >> The
> >>> Symbola font is embedded in the PDF output (created from the PostScript
> >>> output), and the text "And some normal text" and the EIGHT
> >> TEARDROP-SPOKED
> >>> PROPELLER ASTERISK Unicode character are in the Symbola font in the
> troff
> >>> output.
> >>>
> >>> However, if I manually add a CPSuni1F0A1 to the troff output, *that*
> >> character
> >>> *does* show up.
> >>>
> >>> Any ideas as to why the literal PLAYING CARD ACE OF SPADES Unicode
> >>> character in the document source is being ignored and not written to
> the
> >>> troff output?
> >>>
> >>> I actually have a document that needs to use the PLAYING CARD ACE OF
> >> SPADES
> >>> Unicode character.  The ultimate goal is to have the Symbola font used
> >> as a
> >>> fallback font, which should happen automatically in Heirloom troff,
> since
> >>> it searches all the fonts when a font is missing a character, but I
> made
> >>> the example use the Symbola font directly because that shows the
> problem
> >>> directly.
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> T. Kurt Bond, tkurtbond@gmail.com, https://tkurtbond.github.io
> >>
> >>
> >
> > --
> > T. Kurt Bond, tkurtbond@gmail.com, https://tkurtbond.github.io
>
>

-- 
T. Kurt Bond, tkurtbond@gmail.com, https://tkurtbond.github.io