At Mon, 8 Jun 2015 19:44:13 -0400, "James K. Lowden" <jklowden%schemamania.org@localhost> wrote: Subject: Re: Heirloom Troff for NetBSD (was: Removing ARCNET stuffs) > > 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. Indeed. If it were not for its other more major disadvantages (by which I mean its copyright license and its implementation language) the choice between current Groff and current Heirloom Troff would be splitting hairs.... > 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. Indeed. > 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. I'm not so sure that is a rule of any sort, though it has in the past been a "rule of thumb" convention for the many half-baked tools we've suffered through in the past as technical documentation authors and editors. I think more modern tools, including some of the more modern macro packages for both Troff and TeX, as well as of course those tools purposefully designed to be better, such as Lout, have advantages in producing better messages in more mediums. I think the reason these more modern tools are better at making the message fit more mediums is because they move away from describing the details of layout, formatting, justification, etc., and deal more in higher level document structure. Getting the details "right" for a particular medium is often a "one-time" effort serving many authors. > 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. I do agree with that, which is why my personal favourite is Lout. :-) > 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. While that's certainly true that troff _requests_ are at the lowest level, that is far less true of macro packages such as mdoc(7) and MOM which are mostly about high-level document structure, and I think that is partly what muddies the water -- the support for more modern (and more productive) techniques has continued to be improved in these more ancient tools. Like Unix itself these tools have proven very adaptable. > 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. I'm not sure what you mean exactly. I do not see any "choice". When faced with all the issues combined Heirloom Troff is the only decent fit, and has been for the better part of a decade now (though of course some of the newer requirements on the list, such as perhaps navigation support for generated PDFs and better Groff compatibility have only been met by more recent improvements in Heirloom Troff). I suspect it will also continue to be the only viable choice for at least another decade or more. -- Greg A. Woods Planix, Inc. <woods%planix.com@localhost> +1 250 762-7675 http://www.planix.com/
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