eqn formatting issues with grops and gropdf

[joerg van den hoff]

mmh, second try: I've send the below report 8h ago but it seems to not have made it through: there 
are now several more recent messages in the archive. hopefully it succeeds this time:


==original message===

I have compiled an old (>10 years) equation heavy troff ms-document and do see now issues, which I 
believe (but cannot proof) where absent in the past.

consider this example:

.\"====================cut=================
.\"groff -e -ms tt.trf > tt1.ps         -- broken output (output from ps2pdf 
tt1.ps, too, of course)
.\"groff -e -ms -Tpdf tt.trf > tt2.pdf  -- looks good.
.\"----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.LP
.EQ (1)
alpha beta gamma delta rho sigma 1 over 2
.EN
.LP
.EQ (2)
a b c d r s 1 over 2
.EN
.\"====================cut=================

the issues I see are:

1.
in ps output from grops: heavily misalignment of numbers in the 1/2 ratio relative to the dividing 
line when the ratio is preceded by greek symbols but not when preceded by standard characters.
one also can note that there is extraneous and uneven white space between the greek letters (eqn 
should typeset them w/o any white space I believe, basically treating all glyphs as "one word" just 
as happened in Eq.2).

2.
while gropdf output does _not_ have the above misalignment and extraneous whitespace issue, there is 
a inconsistency relative to grops in so far as grops uses the Symbols font for the greek letters 
(i.e. glyphs like \[*a]) while gropdf uses Symbols-Slanted.

remarks:

a)
it seems to me that using the Symbols font like grops does (these days) is the 
desirable behaviour
and what gropdf does (using Symbols-Slanted) is not.

b)
I guess the misalignment of the 1/2 ratio with grops is caused by the mentioned white space between 
(or wrong assumed width of?) the greek letters which cumulatively seems to influence where the 1 and
the 2 in the ratio end up horizontally.

c)
no, I cannot simply switch to gropdf for that document (lots of ps-figures 
included etc.) :)

any ideas?

joerg