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

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden%schemamania.org@localhost>]

On Sun, 7 Jun 2015 18:57:25 +0000
David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:

> The typesetting tool we have (an old groff) is inadequate because it
> does not produce pdf and produces mangy html. It is also undesirable
> because it's GPL'd C++, and because it's roff. (A newer groff does
> not address any of these problems.)

Current groff produces pdf directly and includes macros for
PDF-specific constructs such as hyperlinks.  

As for HTML, I'm not so sure it's all that important as an output
format.  PDFs with hyperlinks have all the advantages of HTML, and
better typography.  

I don't know what your favorite write-once, produce-many tool is.  I
don't have one.  Because "the medium is the message", every author
takes the medium into account.  Every multi-format document I've seen
is best read in one particular format.  It might as be one that prints
out nicely.  

Finally, I don't think "because it's roff" is a technical reason.  It
might be a social one; *maybe* it's harder to get people to write
documentation in roff.  But from a technical standpoint, troff requests
and macros present the lowest markup/content ratio of any system I
know.  ISTM that should be the measure.  

It would be nice to have a BSD license, UTF-8 support,
paragraph-at-a-time formatting, and PDFs with navigation.  Unfortuately
at present we have to choose.  

--jkl