> It boils down to persuading `\w', used by tbl(1), that the U+0301 takes
> no space.
>
> $ groff -Tutf8 >/dev/null
> .nr w \w'A'
> .tm \nw
> 24
> .nr w \w'\[u0435]'
> .tm \nw
> 24
> .nr w \w'\[u0435]\[u0301]'
> .tm \nw
> 48
> $
Indeed. I think this is a bug in groff: The devutf8 font files don't
contain non-spacing glyphs. If you manually enter the line
u0301 0 0 0x0301
to the *installed* utf8 device files `.../font/devutf8/{R,I,B,BI}',
the problem vanishes. Similar lines would be necessary for all other
latin, non-spacing glyphs.
Note that currently the script `font/scripts/genfonts.sh' doesn't
handle an entry `0' in the second column correctly, always overwriting
it with `24' for devutf8; this prevents the proper solution to fix
`font/devutf8/R.proto' directly.
Werner
PS: It seems that the files `dev{utf8,html}/R.in' are no longer in
use.
