Re: Summary of man-page formatting

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 04:16:49PM +0100, Reinoud Zandijk wrote:
 > > > Right, and in my experience it would be completely unsuitable. :)
 > > > 
 > > > Now, don't get me wrong, I love Lout and and when I need a batch
 > > > formatter it's what I use unless there are strong overriding reasons.
 > > > But it's *way* slower than roff or tex (remember, that troff and tex
 > > > are macro processors, while lout uses a functional language).
 > > 
 > > If speed is the primary problem it's probably fixable...
 > 
 > Yeah, who uses rendering a manpage in a tight loop ;) If it runs on
 > the older machines in a few seconds I don't think its going to be
 > an issue. And it isn't that slow is it?

Again, it's not about man pages. We have mandoc, it works; this thread
arose from a discussion of formatting man pages for not-80-columns,
which is a different issue entirely.

The thing we want a new/different solution for is formatting release
notes and miscellaneous documents (and the mostly-nonexistent NetBSD
docshelf, which would be nice to have in a viable state) -- for this
speed is, though not irrelevant, not a primary concern as it'll be
happening on fast build machines in parallel with compilation.

What I meant though was: if the problem is that lout has a functional
language interpreter in it and that interpreter is slow, it can
probably be made faster.

However, I took a quick look at the source yesterday and it seems the
code comes as 52 source files numbered 01-52, which is not, shall we
say, entirely auspicious. :-|

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost