Hello!
I've been playing around with groff recently and once again discovered
that there is a lot of friction involved if you want to use groff with
Cyrillic characters (and probably other kinds of non-latin characters
too).
Usually I have to install a new font to use for the documents, because
otherwise I get errors like this:
troff:example.ms:85: warning: special character 'u044A' not defined
But today I've discovered that groff does not have its own fonts, it
uses fonts provided by ghostscript, it seems. I might be wrong about
some details here, please enlighten me! But the point is that such fonts
are likely to already include Cyrillic characters.
So I ran a little experiment by changing TR font description file in
font/devpdf and adding metrics for Cyrillic characters from the other
font I've used. And it worked! I got Cyrillic characters to render
properly without any warnings.
Which raises a question: what prevents groff to include other common
characters (like Cyrillic) in its font description files out of the box?
