At Thu, 04 Jun 2015 14:53:56 +0200, Johnny Billquist <bqt%softjar.se@localhost> wrote:
Subject: Re: Groff
>
> On 2015-06-04 12:44, Robert Swindells wrote:
> >
> > Johnny Billquist <bqt%softjar.se@localhost> wrote:
> >
> > > What happened to the original roff? I mean, groff is just a gnu
> > > replacement for roff. Maybe switch back to the original?
> >
> > The sources to all of DWB are available from AT&T:
> >
> > <http://www2.research.att.com/~astopen/download/>
> >
> > It needs a bit of work to get it to build on NetBSD though.
>
> Hmm. What about roff from 2.11BSD? That shouldn't be so hard to get
> building on NetBSD...
Have my posts since 2009 about Heirloom Doctools somehow mostly going
into a black hole or something!?!?!?! I get responses of "yes, please!"
on the lists, but nothing happens and people still keep posting truly
lame suggestions as if they've never heard of Heirloom Doctools. I
posted about it in a response to this very thread just three days ago
(though I redirected to tech-userlevel then too)!
Yes, sorry Johnny, but your suggestion really is poor. Ancient troff,
was a poor fit for "modern" use even 25 years ago with psroff to
generate PostScript from its C/A/T output -- it's full of bugs and
missing tons of features (beyond being device independent), and still
written in what's basically PDP11 assembler dressed up as C (i.e. it's
missing all of BWK's extensive rework), never mind that it's not
actually in the original 2.11BSD release, which contains just Berkeley's
bits (and the same small bits are in the 4.4BSD release too).
Heirloom Doctools _is_ the original troff, in its very latest form!
(well, there's a fork on github that's got a bunch more bug fixes)
A better place to get the original troff, in modern form, with an
open-source license would be Plan-9.
However Heirloom Doctools is equivalent to the Plan-9 version, but
without Plan-9 dependencies, and with more fixes and features.
I.e. Heirloom Doctools are the very most up-to-date code from the very
people who wrote and maintained it since the beginning (sans Joe
Ossanna, of course) .
Back before 2009 it already produced PDFs and handled UTF-8.
Heirloom Doctools already builds and works on NetBSD just fine, and
has done so since before 2009 (advertised as working on 2.0 in 2007).
Heirloom Doctools is the essentially the complete set of tools from the
AT&T Documenter's Work Bench suite -- i.e. it contains all the other
_necessary_ pre-processors like eqn, pic, tbl, grap, refer, and vgrind,
and it contains the back-end drivers and font tables for PostScript and
PDF and other printers. The only thing it's really missing are the
papers from /usr/{share/}doc, but those are freely available elsewhere,
including from the DWB release.
As I discussed back in 2009, Heirloom Doctools is essentially better
quality and far more feature-full than the last DWB release, and
arguably has a much better license, and of course DWB since 2009 is
probably never going to see another public maintenance release now that
Glen Fowler has retired. The only thing DWB has over Heirloom Doctools
is arguably better PostScript support (oh, and 'pm', but it's C++ :-)).
Why do people keep forgetting about it, and WTF are we still waiting for?
(once again re-directing to tech-userlelvel where this discussion is
more apropos)
--
Greg A. Woods
Planix, Inc.
<woods%planix.com@localhost> +1 250 762-7675 http://www.planix.com/
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