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

[tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 02:15:43PM -0400, Mouse wrote:
> > This is why I argue that the TeX system (stripped to the minimum) can
> > be used to obtain a totally auto-sufficient formatting system, [...]
> 
> It has, however, nothing like troff's nroff.  It might be possible to
> build such a thing, but from what I recall of TeX it would be hard.

This could be rather easily made with a dvi driver (i.e. taking
the dvi formatted output and extracting the characters and including
rendering sequences depending on the type of fonts).

The characters encoding and substitution exist already: this is done via
virtual fonts. These virtual fonts (whole font substitution or character
mapping) would be handle by the dvi driver. (dvips(1) does this already
as well as every program virtual fonts aware.)

This can be derived from dvitype(1).

What was appalling with TeX is the way it had been packaged. As soon as
the conversion from (basic TeX) Pascal to (TeX limited) C is put aside
and D.E.K's TeX and al. are put aside from the (huge) rest, the task 
can be tackled during, say, a GSoC by one or two "students". No need
to be an Hercules anymore: I have done the cleaning of the Augean
stables. (And to be an Hercules I had only to estimate that it will cost
me less time to redo everything not from scratch but from last small
public domain code than to try to compile TeXlive for NetBSD... And I
was right. I now suspect that Hercules did what he did because he was a
bit lazy...)

And I hope that there will be more lazy people prefering to do small
steps outside of the mob instead of trampling on with the rest of the
flock in an exhausting standstill.
-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                     http://www.arts-po.fr/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C