[Follow-up: see at end] On 25-Jun-2014 10:50:26 Ted Harding wrote: > On 25-Jun-2014 10:16:13 Russell Hyer wrote: >> Hi, >> I am writing to ask whether anyone on this list knows about any >> built in right-to-left support for Groff (without having to resort >> to hacks like using sed to reverse streams of characters)[1]. >> One of the reasons I mention this, is that there was a document or >> a mini solution (perhaps?) provided on the groff mailing list a >> number of years back - but trying to search the web for modern and >> relevant information seems to be fraught with the wrong answers >> (or just bad info). >> >> There was, for example, one solution suggested in 2006, see: >> >> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2006-12/msg00018.html >> >> But it's not clear whether a) this is the only solution and >> b) if there's a coded version of this solution. >> >> Now I do appreciate that PDF and Postscript is, of course, >> left-to-right oriented. I mean, we have the ability in PDF to just >> write: T* (Hello World) Tj to obtain a line of text reading "Hello >> World" - of course such output won't be aligned beautifully. Part of >> the other issue is that il8n means that UTF 8 (or unicode) is now >> supported by our systems and - for example - typing in Hebrew in HTML >> (when using unicode) forces this to output automatically. (Naturally >> there can be some issues with potentially English styling like full >> stops etc.) But, so far as I can tell, whilst advances like mom for >> groff seem to make it easy to use - plus all the other drawing and >> other graphing languages that can be used together with Groff, there >> seems to be some RTL support missing. (That is to say, in HTML, >> Unicode Hebrew letters automatically face the right way (although >> certain English punctuation marks might not without coaxing)). >> >> Thank you for your help, >> >> Russell N Hyer >> Maths Student/Geek/Part time human >> [1] One semi effective way is to use the bidiv programme for Hebrew >> text (but this does kinda suggest that the current system (or my >> setup) is slightly misconfigured for RTL languages; of course in such >> a setup bidiv becomes yet another pre-processor and you also need to >> strip the additional white spacing.) > > It could be interesting to see if others have knowledge of more > recent developments! Unfortunately troff/groff itself is LTR oriented > in its internal workings, and can drop the dish on the floor when > trying to serve up RTL text (especially when RTL segments are embedded > in a mainly LTR text -- e.g. you are writing in English but quoting > Arabic or Hebrew -- line breaks can be a major problem here). > > Many (about 25) years ago there was a version called ffortid > (i.e. RTL "ditroff"). I did try this for a while, but did not manage > to get used to it! > > Nonetheless, if you try a google search on "ffortid" you will get > several hits, some of which may be useful. > > Good luck! > Ted.
A search for "ffortid" in the groff archives came up with the following (which may or may not help): http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2000-11/msg00074.html Ted. ------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.hard...@wlandres.net> Date: 25-Jun-2014 Time: 12:09:14 This message was sent by XFMail -------------------------------------------------
