Hi Peter, On Tue, Sep 09 2014 at 11:31:38 PM, Peter Schaffter <[email protected]> wrote: > The thread on underlining raised a couple of issues. One is whether > a long-established request (.ul) should be updated. The rationale > is that it's unlikely anyone in 2014+ needs (or, if young enough, > even understands) the current behaviour. [...] > Out of that discussion came Doug's excellent suggestion for a new > primitive, '.decor' or similarly named [...] > Problem is, the thread died, and nothing came of it. I suspect that's > in part because we're all leery of mucking about in the sources. It > may also point to a dearth of skilled C++ coders on the list, which, > if true, is something we're going to have to address.
I would not be afraid to dive into the source code. Although my main language is C, not C++, groff's C++ code seems quite understandable for a C programmer, as it was already said in the list. The problem is that I didn't feel I had sufficient general knowledge on groff to participate to the conversation, and other newcomers probably feel the same. I'm not that young but yes, I don't even understand the current behaviour of .ul ! > On a similar note, Ulrich Lautner stepped forward to take on > implementing a modified version of Knuth-Plass. He produced a > prototype showing that the application of dynamic programming to > paragraph formatting can be done with a relatively small piece of code > and at high speed. I was excited, but interest from others hovered > around zero. I'm not sure why: from previous discussions, revamping > groff's paragraph formatting is a priority. If Ulrich is to pursue > this (provided he's still interested, and I, for one, sincerely hope > he is), he needs assistance from the list. I didn't comment for the same reasons, but the subject is very interesting. Once I've finished the automake migration, I'll try to have a look to this topic. Or if someone takes starts implementing the modified Knuth-Plass first I'll be happy to spend some time on tests and debug. Regards, -- Bertrand Garrigues
