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



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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