groff can't embed fonts due to version mismatch

[Paul Eggert]

I have Ubuntu 22.10 x86-64 running groff-base and groff 1.22.4-8build1. I also have Ghostscript installed, as the ghostscript and ghostscript-x 9.56.1~dfsg1-0ubuntu3 packages. These are all the default versions for Ubuntu 22.10 as far as I know.

When I run this shell command:

  printf '%s\n' '.TH zic 8' '.SH NAME' | groff -Tpdf -man -P-e - >x.pdf

I see the following message on stderr:

  Failed to open '/usr/share/ghostscript/9.55.0/Resource/Font/NimbusRoman-Regular'

This is because the file /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/font/devpdf/download contains the line:

        Times-Roman */usr/share/ghostscript/9.55.0/Resource/Font/NimbusRoman-Regular

but this file does not exist. Instead, the following file does exist:

/usr/share/ghostscript/9.56.1/Resource/Font/NimbusRoman-Regular

Apparently groff is built so that it requires GhostScript 9.55.0, but Ubuntu 22.10 comes with a later version of GhostScript, which means groff doesn't work when it wants to embed fonts.