Re: Not Groff! Heirloom Doctools!

[Gerard Lally <gerard%netmail.ie@localhost>]

At date and time Thu, 04 Jun 2015 12:32:55 -0700, Greg A. Woods wrote:

    | At Thu, 04 Jun 2015 14:53:56 +0200, Johnny Billquist <bqt%softjar.se@localhost> wrote:
    | Subject: Re: Groff
    | > 
    | > On 2015-06-04 12:44, Robert Swindells wrote:
    | > > 
    | > > Johnny Billquist <bqt%softjar.se@localhost> wrote:
    | > > 
    | > > > What happened to the original roff? I mean, groff is just a gnu
    | > > > replacement for roff. Maybe switch back to the original?
    | > >
    | > > The sources to all of DWB are available from AT&T:
    | > >
    | > > <http://www2.research.att.com/~astopen/download/>
    | > >
    | > > It needs a bit of work to get it to build on NetBSD though.
    | > 
    | > Hmm. What about roff from 2.11BSD? That shouldn't be so hard to get
    | > building on NetBSD...
    | 
    | Have my posts since 2009 about Heirloom Doctools somehow mostly going
    | into a black hole or something!?!?!?!  I get responses of "yes, please!"
    | on the lists, but nothing happens and people still keep posting truly
    | lame suggestions as if they've never heard of Heirloom Doctools.  I
    | posted about it in a response to this very thread just three days ago
    | (though I redirected to tech-userlevel then too)!
    | 
    | Yes, sorry Johnny, but your suggestion really is poor.  Ancient troff,
    | was a poor fit for "modern" use even 25 years ago with psroff to
    | generate PostScript from its C/A/T output -- it's full of bugs and
    | missing tons of features (beyond being device independent), and still
    | written in what's basically PDP11 assembler dressed up as C (i.e. it's
    | missing all of BWK's extensive rework), never mind that it's not
    | actually in the original 2.11BSD release, which contains just Berkeley's
    | bits (and the same small bits are in the 4.4BSD release too).
    | 
    | Heirloom Doctools _is_ the original troff, in its very latest form!
    | (well, there's a fork on github that's got a bunch more bug fixes)
    | 
    | A better place to get the original troff, in modern form, with an
    | open-source license would be Plan-9.
    | 
    | However Heirloom Doctools is equivalent to the Plan-9 version, but
    | without Plan-9 dependencies, and with more fixes and features.
    | I.e. Heirloom Doctools are the very most up-to-date code from the very
    | people who wrote and maintained it since the beginning (sans Joe
    | Ossanna, of course) .
    | 
    | Back before 2009 it already produced PDFs and handled UTF-8.
    | 
    | Heirloom Doctools already builds and works on NetBSD just fine, and
    | has done so since before 2009 (advertised as working on 2.0 in 2007).
    | 
    | Heirloom Doctools is the essentially the complete set of tools from the
    | AT&T Documenter's Work Bench suite -- i.e. it contains all the other
    | _necessary_ pre-processors like eqn, pic, tbl, grap, refer, and vgrind,
    | and it contains the back-end drivers and font tables for PostScript and
    | PDF and other printers.  The only thing it's really missing are the
    | papers from /usr/{share/}doc, but those are freely available elsewhere,
    | including from the DWB release.
    | 
    | As I discussed back in 2009, Heirloom Doctools is essentially better
    | quality and far more feature-full than the last DWB release, and
    | arguably has a much better license, and of course DWB since 2009 is
    | probably never going to see another public maintenance release now that
    | Glen Fowler has retired.  The only thing DWB has over Heirloom Doctools
    | is arguably better PostScript support (oh, and 'pm', but it's C++ :-)).
    | 
    | Why do people keep forgetting about it, and WTF are we still waiting for?

Can Peter Schaffter's mom macros[1] for groff be used with heirloom
troff? These macros turned groff into a much more user-friendly and
powerful typesetting system. The advantage of heirloom troff is that it
does paragraph-at-once formatting while groff is still restricted to
line-at-once formatting. Being able to use the mom macros in heirloom
troff would make for a powerful combination. A tiny memory footprint
producing documents almost on a par with those output by the much
bigger TeX (Thierry Laronde's KerTex excepted, of course!).

[1] http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-01.html

-- 
Gerard Lally