Groff: how to successfully compile a manpage, containing Cyrillic in UTF-8?

Question

Colleagues, please tell me what arguments you need to set for groff so that it compiles the manpage writed in Cyrillic, in UTF-8 encoding.

I have a number of pages written in markdown and converted to nroff by the lowdown utility. Groff version 1.19.2 for FreeBSD 11.4 amd64.

If I run with the options like 'groff -man -Tutf8', then he is very unhappy:
standard input:3: warning: can't find character with input code 157
standard input:3: warning: can't find character with input code 144
standard input:3: warning: can't find character with input code 151
standard input:3: warning: can't find character with input code 146
standard input:3: warning: can't find character with input code 152
standard input:3: warning: can't find character with input code 149
standard input:4: warning: can't find character with input code 143

How do I get groff to work with such pages?

Answer 1

If you use specific characters, you must use a font that contains them. Depending a bit on your system, that may be dejavu for example.

groff -man -Tutf8 -f dejavu