groff && UTF-8

[Julian H. Stacey]

> If you want to produce postscript output from groff, you will have to deal
> with postscript fonts. The usual Type 1 fonts are single-byte fonts. Groff
> only deals with Latin-1 characters (see groff_char(7)).

What is Latin-1 ?
	( BTW is Latin a common misnomer ? - I recall Latin by
	  Romans on stones omits curved characters, as difficult
	  for stone masons' chisels. Latin with ink had a bit of a
	  bigger alphabet I recall, but had less than English, &
	  English has less than German.

I generate German umlauts with groff, to postscript & html output.
	( For those lucky people who've not needed to know what Umlauts are:
	  The 2 dots above A O U in German (can also be represented
	  as AE, OE, UE - theres also a double SS (lower
	  case only) that looks like a beta sign, ths ss got officialy 
	  dumped last decade, practically it's still seen).

	Groff escapes: \(:A \(:O \(:U \(:a \(:o \(:u \(ss
	I define groff macros
		http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/standards/umlauts.rof
	& I use in .rof eg: \*(:u 
	& my Makefile macros can swith to output either .ps or .html with
	HTML escapes: Ä Ö Ü ä ö ü &sslig;

Americans are lucky, unburdered by extended randomised European alphabets etc: 
	I (English, but in Germany decades) find European extra
	characters a pain: There used to be multiple variants of
	single byte allocations for Umlauts (see URL above), & 4
	german keyboard layouts (normal & ISO) x (German & Swiss).
	The Swedish O with a line through is a pipe in Ascii - (A
	pain importing Swedish translations for shell scripts).
	Even the British dont have same keyboard layout as native
	American PC scan codes (blame that on typewriter manufacturers
	way back) - (try searching for ~ | > < ' 1 on British &
	German keyboards in single user mode after a failed boot).
	Russian keyboards move all numbers 1 to the [right?].  (
	So forget eg country codes 1, 7, 49 (per tel.) as a selector
	on trilingual American / German / Russian keyboard.

Cheers,
Julian
-- 
Julian Stacey, BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultants Munich http://berklix.com
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