[9fans] troff and times roman, need for accented characters

[Rudolf Sykora]

Hello,

I again bumped into this awkward topic.

Being Czech I need to write with quite a few accented characters.
Being a physicist I write some math, too, and I use unicode characters
often.

Plan9 as well as p9p troff is not set up for using accented characters
I need (above 0xff but below 0x1ff, such as ď, ě, ň, ř, š, ť, ů, ž) in
Times-Roman. It switches to LucidaSans for the range, which is pretty
bad. Using LucidaSans for all text is not an option. I need
Times-Roman (or some other serif font).

Had it not been for math, Heirloom troff would solve the problem
(knows unicode, typesets all the characters I need). However, for some
reason, it typesets math differently than when plan9 or p9p troff is
used. Basically, results from heirloom troff + heirloom eqn, or
heirloom troff + p9p eqn, are bad for some reason.

Has somebody ever fought with this? (probably not...)

There is a type1 urw font NimbusRoNo9L, which is free, basically
Times-Roman, and has the characters I need. But I do not know
precisely what should be done to be able to use it. As it is, it seems
to be a type1 font, but with more than 255 glyphs, so I believe that
those for-me-interesting glyphs cannot be directly indexed. I read
somewhere they can only be used under their unicode names or what. If
this is true, I need to do something with the font, probably divide it
into two... Does anybody know more and can help?

Thank you!
Ruda

[t***@polynum.com]

Post by Rudolf Sykora
Had it not been for math, Heirloom troff would solve the problem
(knows unicode, typesets all the characters I need). However, for some
reason, it typesets math differently than when plan9 or p9p troff is
used. Basically, results from heirloom troff + heirloom eqn, or
heirloom troff + p9p eqn, are bad for some reason.
Has somebody ever fought with this? (probably not...)

This is one reason why TeX is preferable, giving it all in one program.

The only problem---but circumventable---is that TeX by itself uses 256
characters for text (this is not the case for math: it uses more, and
that's why unicode via utf-8 is not unachievable without changing hugely
the engine), so one has to convert Unicode to some 8 bits encoding.

The type1 fonts (standard PostScript fonts) are available with the TeX
engine and with european encodings.

And there is TeX for Plan9 via kerTeX:

http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html

This is probably not the answer if the question is "how to do with troff
etc."; but this is an answer.

[Pavel Klinkovsky]

Post by Rudolf Sykora
Has somebody ever fought with this? (probably not...)

I have already "imported" some font to Plan9 troff containing Czech characters.
It is pretty boring work... ;)

But I think I can help you.

Pavel

[Rudolf Sykora]

Post by Pavel Klinkovsky

Post by Rudolf Sykora
Has somebody ever fought with this? (probably not...)

I have already "imported" some font to Plan9 troff containing Czech characters.
It is pretty boring work... ;)
But I think I can help you.
Pavel

That's nice to hear.
Also, started by my question here on 9fans, I had a longer private
discussion with Ali Gholami Rudi, who did yet another port of plan9
troff tools to linux, http://litcave.rudi.ir/. With this software,
after some small adjustments, it seems I'll be able to achieve what I
currently need --- prepare a Czech presentation (or I will switch to
latex/beamer for the moment).

In the future, however, I'd like to approach this problem again in
more details, so that it's solved for me hopefully for ever. I will
then ask what you can do /did.

Thanks for your answer!
Ruda