[Bug 1008115] Re: man displays φ (u03C6) as ϕ (u03D5)

[Colin Watson]

groff_char(7) seems to document some oddities around phi:

  "These glyphs are intended for technical use, not for real Greek;
normally, the uppercase letters have upright shape, and the lowercase
ones are slanted.  There is a problem with the mapping of letter phi to
Unicode.  Prior to Unicode version 3.0, the difference between U+03C6,
GREEK SMALL LETTER PHI, and U+03D5, GREEK PHI SYMBOL, was not clearly
described; only the glyph shapes in the Unicode book could be used as a
reference.  Starting with Unicode 3.0, the reference glyphs have been
exchanged and described verbally also: In mathematical context, U+03D5
is the stroked variant and U+03C6 the curly glyph.  Unfortunately, most
font vendors didn't update their fonts to this (incompatible) change in
Unicode.  At the time of this writing (January 2006), it is not clear
yet whether the Adobe Glyph Names `phi' and `phi1' also change its
meaning if used for mathematics, thus compatibility problems are likely
to happen – being conservative, groff currently assumes that `phi' in a
PostScript symbol font is the stroked version.

  In groff, symbol `\[*f]' always denotes the stroked version of phi,
and `\[+f]' the curly variant."

It might be useful if somebody familiar with Greek could take this up
directly with groff upstream, since it seems that the needs of
mathematical Greek may conflict with those of real Greek?  It certainly
seems odd that the definitions in glyphuni.cpp and uniglyph.cpp aren't
mirror images of each other.


** Package changed: man-db (Ubuntu) => groff (Ubuntu)

** Changed in: groff (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Undecided => Medium

** Changed in: groff (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Triaged

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1008115

Title:
  man displays φ (u03C6) as ϕ (u03D5)

Status in “groff” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  While running `man help2man` I noticed that the Greek small letter Phi (u03C6) was displayed as Greek Phi symbol (u03D5) instead, e.g. like this:
  "που εμϕανίζονται στο αρχείο για να συμπεριληϕθούν"
  instead of this:
  "που εμφανίζονται στο αρχείο για να συμπεριληφθούν".

  `zcat /usr/share/man/el/man1/help2man.1.gz` vefiries that the problem
  is in `man` and not in the help2man manpage.

  Using man-db 2.6.1-2.

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