[Remind-Fans] Unicode problems with rem2ps and my radical solution

[Dianne Skoll]

On Sun, 23 Jan 2022 17:49:42 +0300
rr via Remind-fans <remind-fans at lists.skoll.ca> wrote:

> Thanks. Unfortunately, my language is one of that out-of-luck
> languages. But it's strange for me that PS can't work with UTF8 while
> groff can produce unicode-compatible ps documents.

If you look at the PostScript output that groff produces, it's likely
to be very complicated.  PostScript was designed well before Unicode, and
it really lacks the flexibility to support UTF-8 nicely.  If you Google
"PostScript UTF-8" you'll see tons of StackExchange articles where
people bemoan the lack of UTF-8 support in PostScript.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/postscript-discussions/utf-8-encoding-and-quot-show-quot/m-p/6105825

> Also I found some tool called "paps" to convert unicode to ps. Maybe
> it can be useful?

paps isn't useful as-is because it only converts plain-text.  rem2ps
actually uses PostScript to do line-splitting; it takes advantage of the
fact that PostScript is a real programming language to do some of the
formatting work directly in PostScript.

I think the proper way to fully-support UTF-8 PostScript output is to rewrite
rem2ps to use the Cairo graphics library to draw the calendar; Cairo
supports UTF-8 on all of its output devices, including PostScript.

However, that's a massive task. :(

Regards,

Dianne.