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

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>>> 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,
>> ...including the ability to get most of the content out of them with
>> plain text tools like `less'.
> You know as well as I do that if it's troff we're talking about that
> can produce navigable, hyperlinked PDFs, then nroff meets that
> requirement.

The text was comparing "PDFs with hyperlinks" versus "HTML" - as output
formats.  And, as such, it seems fair to me to point out that the
minimum tool needed to get content out of them is much simpler for HTML
than for PDFs (with or without hyperlinks).  Whether the system under
discussion also can produce yet other output formats, perhaps even
better according to that metric, is not relevant to that comparison
(though of course it may be relevant to the larger discussion).

> I don't know if nroff is unique in the markup-to-terminal "market".

It's not, though it may be if you restrict it to tools in widespread
live use.  Back in the day, DEC had a thing called RUNOFF that was very
much like nroff from a highish-level point of view; I've seen mention
of its existence for RT-11 and I know it existed for VMS (which latter
means modern VMS quite possibly still has it).

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