[bug #64155] specifying -fZD on command line generates warnings

[Deri James]

Follow-up Comment #29, bug #64155 (group groff):


> Well, when you're prepared to discuss it, it would be good to know if/how
Dave's original report in comment #0 was invalid

I think I can answer this - it is certainly not invalid, it just has nothing
to do with ZD not being a "proper" family (in your eyes). If you do -fZD,
which has no alphabetic glyphs, any start up macros which contain conditional
statements of the form:-

.if '\*[.T]'html' \" etc..

Will produce character not found errors, since, as we know, both sides are
formatted in separate environments and compared.

The give away in Dave's initial report is that the "character undefined"
errors spell out the words "ps/pdf/html" at least can be seen. I'm sure this
"feature" has come up before. Even with Branden's code which stopped -fZD from
working did not address the real problem because if you have four fonts with
R, I, B, and BI extension but don't contain alphabetic characters, -f works
for the "family" but you will see exactly the same errors as Dave reported.

One way for a proper fix, is to create a copy of TR as TRSKEL, add the
"special" parameter, and change the name parameter to TRSKEL, remove all
kernpairs, delete all glyph definitions above 127, and finally alter the DESC
file by incrementing the number and adding TRSKEL on the end. This will solve
the error occurring if you use -f on fonts which don't contain ascii glyphs,
such as some CJK fonts. This can all be done in the devpdf directory (I have
done it for testing), but a very similar change can be made to devps as well.

An alternative fix would be to consider including the GNU UnifontMedium font
in groff and using it as a special instead of TRSKEL, this has the advantage
of solving any undefined glyphs as well, but there are other issues.



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