According to the Heirloom Troff manual, I think that you cannot just insert Unicode characters (although maybe if your LC* environment variables are set correctly, you can?). It says:
> Both nroff and troff allow references to specific Unicode characters with the > \U'X' escape sequence; > it causes the character at position U+X to be printed (X is a hexadecimal > number). For troff, > it is required that this character is available in one of the fonts mounted > at this point. > As an example, \U'20AC' prints the Euro character €. When register .g is set > to 1 Unicode > characters can also be accessed with \[uXXXX] where XXXX is a four digit > hexadecimal number. So I think you would need to use `\U'1F0A1'` for the character to show up? Ricky > On Aug 4, 2020, at 12:28 PM, T. Kurt Bond <tkurtb...@gmail.com> wrote: > > (The heirloom-doctools README.md > <https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-doctools/blob/master/README.md> says > to ask Heirloom doctools questions on this list.) > > I'd like to use the Symbola font in Heirloom troff. I tried the following: > > .do xflag 3 > .\" fp 5 Optima Optima-Regular ttf > .fp 5 Symbola Symbola otf > .LP > Here is some normal text. > .\" PLAYING CARD ACE OF SPACES is Unicode 0x1F0A1 > .ft Symbola > 🂡 And some normal text. ❊ > .ft P > More normal text. > > That's a literal PLAYING CARD ACE OF SPADES Unicode character at the start > of the line between the two .ft requests. That character does not show up > in the troff output, even through the EIGHT TEARDROP-SPOKED PROPELLER > ASTERISK Unicode character at the end of the line *does* show up, > as CPSuni274A where the CPS<name> outputs the character of that name. The > Symbola font is embedded in the PDF output (created from the PostScript > output), and the text "And some normal text" and the EIGHT TEARDROP-SPOKED > PROPELLER ASTERISK Unicode character are in the Symbola font in the troff > output. > > However, if I manually add a CPSuni1F0A1 to the troff output, *that* character > *does* show up. > > Any ideas as to why the literal PLAYING CARD ACE OF SPADES Unicode > character in the document source is being ignored and not written to the > troff output? > > I actually have a document that needs to use the PLAYING CARD ACE OF SPADES > Unicode character. The ultimate goal is to have the Symbola font used as a > fallback font, which should happen automatically in Heirloom troff, since > it searches all the fonts when a font is missing a character, but I made > the example use the Symbola font directly because that shows the problem > directly. > > -- > T. Kurt Bond, tkurtb...@gmail.com, https://tkurtbond.github.io
