bugGNU roff - Bugs: bug #63124, [gxditview] want CJK language...

 
 

bug #63124: [gxditview] want CJK language support

Submitter:  G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Submitted:  Wed 28 Sep 2022 07:11:02 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  Driver - others/general Severity:  1 - Wish
Item Group:  Feature change Status:  None
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  None
Open/Closed:  Open Planned Release:  None
* Mandatory Fields

Add a New Comment Rich Markup
   

Fri 30 Sep 2022 11:38:48 AM UTC, comment #1: 

That link to the Debian report doesn't work for me, but this one does: http://bugs.debian.org/182462

Dave <barx>
Group Member
Wed 28 Sep 2022 07:11:02 PM UTC, original submission:  

19 years ago, Fumitoshi Ukai reported this issue to the Debian Project.

I took a look at it to sketch the requirements for resolving it.


Something is the matter with groff 1.22.4 in Debian bullseye, but I got
the following to render as expected, except for Japanese glyph coverage.

$ zcat /usr/share/man/ja/man5/apt_preferences.5.gz \
  | ./build/test-groff -k -man -TX100-12

(As you may know from your past contributions, test-groff is a shell
script that wraps groff and sets up environment variables to make it
easy to run a compiled groff from its build tree.)

There appear to me to be a few problems here.  Two are under groff's
control and one is not.

1.  gxditview's default FontMap considers only font with the ISO 8859-1
    (and that of the Adobe PostScript Symbol font).
2.  xtotroff, the tool that generates groff font description files from
    X11 font data, doesn't know how to write font descriptions using
    what XLFDs call the "iso10646-1" encoding.  So that tool would need
    to be enhanced.
3.  The worst problem of all is that, for instance, the Times Roman font
    gxditview uses simply has no glyph coverage that permits the
    rendering of Japanese.  These start at about U+3000, but
      xfd -fn '-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--*-100-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1'
    reveals a font that ends at U+26FF.

While it would be good to solve the first two problems, it seems
unlikely to me that anyone is ever to revisit the X11 core (a.k.a.
server-side) fonts to add Japanese glyph coverage.

On the other hand, we did have the xfonts-cjk package back in the day,
so perhaps we could address points #1 and #2 to incorporate them.

Some might wonder why we would even bother to work on such an antiquated
X11 client founded on such retro technology.

My response is that it might well be easier than the alternative, as
this despairing exchange from 2018 illustrates:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16539446

To address these issues we're going to need a little more knowledge and
an energetic volunteer.  :)


G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator

 

(Note: upload size limit is set to 16384 kB, after insertion of the required escape characters.)

Attach Files:
   
   
Comment:
   

No files currently attached

 

Depends on the following items: None found

Items that depend on this one: None found

 

Carbon-Copy List
  • -email is unavailable- added by gbranden (Submitted the item)
  •  

    There are 0 votes so far. Votes easily highlight which items people would like to see resolved in priority, independently of the priority of the item set by tracker managers.

    Only logged-in users can vote.

     

    Follow 2 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2022-09-30 barx Carbon-CopyRemoved 93119 -
    2022-09-28 gbranden Summary[gxditview] lacks CJK language support [gxditview] want CJK language support

    Back to the top

    Powered by Savane 3.13-f8d8.
    Corresponding source code