At Tue, 31 Mar 2015 12:24:51 +0100, Gerard Lally <lists+netbsd.users%netmail.ie@localhost> wrote:
Subject: Request to reconsider removal of groff from base system
>
> As someone who uses groff as a lightweight alternative to TeX and
> friends**
I would argue that groff is far from lightweight, even within the
confines of Troff-like systems. :-)
The real original Troff in its modern UTF-8 using form would probably be
a much better alternative (and it's probably smaller too):
http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html
(it does not appear there is a pkgsrc/textproc/heirloom-doctools yet though)
If you want a truly lightweight version of Troff you should look at the
old Mark Williams Company COHERENT version, now freely available:
http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/
http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/source.php
The full source for their troff and macros also appears to be included
in their full documentation archive:
http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/doc/doc.tgz
It is only about 10k lines of C. Total. It seems to be trivial to
build it on NetBSD, and it seems to work too, though I only tried the
most rudimentary test. No other goodies though, like pic, eqn, tbl,
grap, and so on....
Best of all though, for an even more modern and much easier to use, and
still mostly lightweight (less than 14MB installed static-linked on
amd64) document formatting system you might consider Basser Lout:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/lout/
(in pkgsrc at textproc/lout)
I was an ardent and prolific user of Troff for decades, but once I tried
Lout I switched to it entirely and immediately and I have never looked
back (though I would still install the Unix Heirloom doctools to format
old documents).
--
Greg A. Woods
Planix, Inc.
<woods%planix.com@localhost> +1 250 762-7675 http://www.planix.com/
Attachment:
pgpcFzbMuekX6.pgp
Description: PGP signature