Aw: Re: Not Groff! Heirloom Doctools!

[carsten.kunze%arcor.de@localhost]

Gerard Lally <gerard%netmail.ie@localhost> wrote:

> 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!).

Gunnar (Heirloom-doctools author) had tested that once (maybe back in around 2005) and it had worked.  Normally it should work, Gunnar had added much of groffs extensions and a groff compatibility mode too.  Now it depends on how much of the very special groff features are used in mom (maybe by intent?) which could it make "impossible" today to use mom with heirloom troff.  I intented to contact Peter some time ago but since there always other things to do...  But I'll ask him if he is interested in some support for that (maybe an .if here or there could already solve it).

There had also been the UTROFF macros for heirloom troff [1]*, but it could be that they are abandoned now.

Carsten

[1] http://utroff.org/

* Utroff uses a heirloom troff release from 2008 which has some bugs that are fixed in newer releases.