Hello all. I started learning japanese and it could be of great help if I had a japanese kana (and perhaps kanji) typesetting method. Is that possible in groff?
Here is how I tried to do it on my own: (1) I googled on groff and japanese. There seems to be a "ja-groff" or "jgroff" with the proper extensions, but trying to find it became a kafkaesque adventure. I found diff.gz files at BSD ports (this is a slackware 10.0), and description files, and then ".tbz" files which I can't manage. There was a ja-groff.[version].tgz at a bsd port, but after some kilobyte the downloading process was canceled. Tried it several times. It was a bit strange, chasing after hints and links to ja-groff and then finding nothing... Then I saw mentioned a collection of /dev/nippon device files for groff. But I didn't find them. It will be my fault, I'm not good at googleing, and the telefone line here to this small valley often breaks down. --- Does somebody know where a kana-capable groff version exists? (2) Some time ago I made a good experience installing cyrillic fonts, using the "wncyr" fonts of the latex distribution and converting them with "tfmtodit". Worked with no problems at all. So I thought this could be done with kana as well, and there is the CJK-Latex package. Werner Lemberg says in the README there that installing from source isn't trivial, so I preferred a binary version, the tex live CD from tug.org. OK. I didn't find my way through all those afm, tfm, pk, ttf, pfb &c. files. There is "japaneseAFM.tgz", but I couldn't manage those fonts. The "afm2tfm" program complains that these are no adobe fonts, and "afmtodit" generates an empty file. Now I have to decide. If there is no groff package : Should I learn TeX & friends (Latex, CJK, Omega - ?) properly and go on in this direction - perhaps with the perspective of porting the fonts to groff? (Eventually migrating from slackware to debian or suse for this purpose, because there is a CJK package in the distribution?) Or go a more easy way, using (X)html with unicode? Or postpone the project and learn the basics of font installing on a Linux system first? (If anyone could give me a hint where to begin, I'd be grateful.) Any comments welcome. Perhaps the project is too big for me. erich _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
