[Gllug] Troff, Eqn, Greek

[- Tethys]

On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 4:02 PM, Mick Farmer <mick at dcs.bbk.ac.uk> wrote:

> Does anyone still use troff?

Yep.

> Anyway, in eqn I'm writing "bold alpha", without the quotes
> and getting a plain alpha.
>
> Anyone as old as me know how to solve this?

It's not eqn specific. Try:

	1: abc\(*a\(*b\(*g
	.br
	2: \fBabc\(*a\(*b\(*g\fP

in plain troff, you'll see they're both the same. Troff's handling of
non-ASCII characters is somewhat arcane. If it can't find a glyph for
a particular character in the standard font list, it looks for it in
what is calls special fonts. There are two special fonts in ditroff
(and thus in groff) -- SS and S. These are Symbol Slanted and Symbol,
containing oblique and roman symbols respectively. Since the standard
PostScript fonts don't contain Greek characters, troff falls back to
the symbol fonts, which are only available in italic and roman, not
bold.

So to fix it, you'd need to find a bold symbol font[1], and add it to
the troff special font list (using .special)

Tet

[1] Google tells me that ITC do one, but you'll probably have to pay
for it. That said, the last ITC fonts I bought were priced fairly
reasonably.

-- 
Perl is like vise grips. You can do anything with it but it is the
wrong tool for every job. -- Bruce Eckel
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