Re: Groff

[Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost>]

tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost writes:

> On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 05:50:07PM +0000, David Holland wrote:
>> On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 09:24:48PM -0400, Andrew Cagney wrote:
>> 
>>  > (oh and please delete C++ groff,  just replace it with that AWK script)
>> 
>> which awk script? :-)
>> 
>> (quite seriously, I've been looking for a while for an alternative to
>> groff for typesetting the miscellaneous articles in base.
>> 
>
> (Delenda Carthago...) Once more, I will re-advertise that the complete
> Donald E. Knuth typesetting system is available, that can be even 
> restricted to strictly just D.E.K.'s work (even with the fonts,
> this is a matter of far less than 10 MB); that is pure C89
> (some auxiliaries invoke POSIX.2 utilities, mainly sh(1) but these
> are just auxiliaries); that comes with the fonts, the ability to
> design the fonts, the formatting (TeX) and a format dvi à la PDF
> that can be used to generate a formatted text version; the means
> to use also mathematics; the means to draw figures rasterized with
> METAFONT (more general figures with MetaPOST, supplementary, but
> this generates PS); and with a compiling framework that is not GPLn
> but BSD.
>
> Since for a system written in C the main "human" language is "CEE"
> that is a kind of technical english, the limitation to 8 bits (that
> could be changed by dealing with font directories and not font
> files, i.e. a directory of 256 glyphes sub-font) is not an immediate 
> problem.
>
> The conversion from roff to tex should be easier than the
> reverse and I expect relatively simple for 95% of the work (the man
> pages).
>
> IMHO, the main tasks remaining are (could be GSoC by the way):
> - give a DVI viewer (starting from scratch);
> - extend with the minimal changes TeX to be able to use UTF-8 (meaning,
> as UTF-8, that ASCII can be fed as is, but that this is just 8 bits
> still at entry---mouth);
> - whether develop a C SmallScript to be able to interpret the limited
> MetaPOST PostScript; or extend DVI and METAFONT to handle MetaPOST
> capabilities and rasterize the figures, in order for the system to
> be totally self-sufficient (no PDF viewer or PostScript interpreter to
> be able to render the pages).
>
> It is here:
>
> 	http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html
>
> It is not orphaned but stalled for the moment due to ETIME.

There's a lot better approach that beats all the above on all accounts.

Import libxml2, libxslt, w3m that are all readily available, convert man
pages to a human-readable and human-writable format, which is XML,
and stop using archaic formats.

This has a number of significant benefits over TeX or roff:
1. XML is well-known, the syntax doesn't require anything special to learn.
2. There's abundancy of software to process it.
3. XML can be used immediately, without preprocessing step (just point
web browser at it, and it will load stylesheet and perform XSL
transformation for you).
4. Desktop users will have really good rendering as provided by Firefox
or Webkit.
5. You can have better searching and indexing tools (because they exist
already).
6. You can enforce all those rules that are currently enforced manually
by wizd(8) with an already existing Schema definition.

Just in case you don't know, nearly any user has libxml2 and libxslt
installed anyway.


-- 
HE CE3OH...