Dear All, There have been discussions before (and I had a private exchange with Werner on that topic) if groff can be made Chinese-/Japanese-capable.
I do understand that there seem to be complicated issues with the correct processing of wide characters, and I do accept that the line breaking algorithm hasn't been set up to deal with the rather complex requirements of what action is expected when a given class of characters hits the wall, i.e. the end of the line, e.g. punctuation marks (they protrude into the margin). On the other hand, groff and man interact well when Japanese man pages are displayed (one just has to adjust the locale, et voilà!). For the terminal, this works fine; not for many other output devices. Now my question given that I have a huge pile of Western-language texts with occasional insertions of Chinese and Japanese (usually book titles and names of persons) which I'd like to process. (bib)LaTeX fails due to the size of my bibliography database, so that is not an option. Would it be sufficient to define and install a font spanning the CJK character range to trick groff into putting CJK characters into PDF output? For my current purpose, I can absolutely accept if I have to fine-tune the output by manually inserting line-breaks etc. In other words, I do not expect to get full CJK processing capabilities, I only hope to display a few characters here and there properly. Thank you for all insights and warnings. Best regards, Oliver.
