Re: Heirloom Troff for NetBSD (was: Removing ARCNET stuffs)

[Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>]

On Sun, Jun 07, 2015 at 18:57:25 +0000, David Holland wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 02:11:03PM -0700, Greg A. Woods wrote:
>  > > (quite seriously, I've been looking for a while for an alternative to
>  > > groff for typesetting the miscellaneous articles in base.
>  > 
>  > I don't see how you can be serious, unless you've got objections to
>  > viable alternatives that you've not yet voiced (so far as I can find).
>  > 
>  > Way back in 2009 on tech-userlevel I proposed the following:
>  > 
>  >   However now that I've looked more closely at the Heirloom Documentation
>  >   Tools, I think they might be the best all-round replacement for GNU
>  >   Troff in NetBSD:
>  >   
>  >   	http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html
>  >   
>  >   They're already ported and running on NetBSD. They are much better
>  >   supported than the DWB-3.3 release and already include UTF-8 support.
>  >   They're possibly even better supported than the Plan 9 version.
>  > 
>  > You were reading that thread, and in your contribution to it you vaguely
>  > suggested that your goal would be to replace troff input syntax.
>  > However you did not respond to my proposal.
> 
> Anyway, my thoughts on this subject are as follows:
> 
>  - we have a bunch of miscellaneous articles that we ship with base;
>  - we should ship them as plain text, html, and pdf;
>  - that we don't have html and pdf readers in base is irrelevant;
>  - that roff is undesirable as a source form and I'm willing to
>    translate the articles if that looks necessary or desirable.

I think this is orthogional to shipping _some_ version of roff.
Whatever we think of roff as a source form for docs in 21 century,
there's enough stuff floating around that comes with docs in roff.


> The idea of adopting the original troff has come up many times, and as
> far as I can recall the conclusion each time has been that it would
> need quite a bit of work to be suitable, work that nobody seems to be
> very enthusiastic about. If someone has now already done that work,
> maybe it's become a viable option.

textproc/heirloom-doctools moved from wip to pkgsrc now and there are
no patches, so integrating it into base build should be ~trivial, I
guess.  An orthogonal question is how well it handles existing roff
documents, but I assume it does :).  UTF-8 support, TTF and T1
support, etc, all make it a very attractive candidate for base
system's roff.


>  > Of course if _new_ significant documents are being written then perhaps
>  > opportunity should be given to do so with some new tools.  My personal
>  > vote would be for Lout.  It vastly improves on what troff can do, but it
>  > also effectively replaces all the other associated and necessary tools
>  > (pic, eqn, tbl, grap), and it generates PDFs as well.
> 
> Lout has come up repeatedly also. I don't know anything substantive
> amount it, but for the most part nobody who does seems to think it's
> particularly suitable.

Yes.  I think I am in position to have an informed opinion on Lout, I
love it, but I don't think Lout is suitable for this.


-uwe