🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <JJC.90Dec31183059@jclark.jclark.UUCP> jjc@jclark.UUCP (James Clark) writes:
>Groff has a composite character feature which helps with using ISO
>8859/1 with a device that doesn't have all the ISO 8859/1 characters.
>For example, suppose you want to be able to input an `a' circumflex
>using ISO 8859/1 (`a' circumflex has code 0342), and suppose you have
>a device which has the letter `a' and has a circumflex accent, but
>doesn't have an `a' circumflex as a single character.  Assuming `\*^'
>has been defined appropriately, you just have to do:

So does psroff.  In fact, I'd like to include the following plea to Nils-Peter
for consideration in DWB 3.2:

It is not necessary to limit the emit sequence in the ditroff width table
files to be just one character.  It would be advantageous to permit the
fourth field in the width table to consist of any arbitrary sequence
of characters, including backslash escape sequences (octal, maybe even
hex ala 1003.1 string definitions).  In this way, people can produce
composite characters for mundane things (such as O overstrike c) that
a printer doesn't support, as well as Latin-1 extensions on printers
that are short the special glyphs, and even get at characters you call
for by name (the characters not in the default postscript encoding
vectors).

Psroff has this feature: embedded in the built-in emit sequences (after all,
CAT troff can't extend it's basic character set) plus translation override
facilities, with multiple char codes, and indeed, invocations of Postscript
drawing routines or glyph-backspace-glyph sequences etc.

>.char \342 a\\*^

This feature is going to be appearing in Psroff soon.

As another plea, in the extremely unlikely event that somebody does get
to diddle SVR4 CAT Troff and sees this posting, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE implement
"\!".  This directive should simply pump it's arguments out *in* the
CAT code stream, prefixing it with an unused CAT code (eg: 'M') and
terminated with a null or newline.  That would make my life complete.

[I enjoy the simple life ;-)]
-- 
Chris Lewis, Phone: (613) 832-0541
UUCP: uunet!utai!lsuc!ecicrl!clewis
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