Hi Marc, On Tue Jan 21, 2025 at 5:48 AM CET, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > [replying to list instead of privately, with consent] > At 2025-01-09T11:29:37+0100, Marc Daniel Fege wrote: > [...] > > The third area of request I find is with the refer(1) preprocessor: > > 1.: > > If you read Bill Tuthills paper about REFER, as well as various > > contemporary books and docs of the 1980's about UNIX text processing, > > they all refer also to a nice tool or script like addbib(1), which > > provides some prompt to input a bibliography file by a user and > > formats them accordingly. sortbib(1) is an analogue thing not yet > > available with the groff suite. > > This prospect doesn't excite me a lot. First, apart from yourself (one > of an elite few who has actually read Tuthill's refer(1) document), no > demand has been expressed for these tools. Second, the bibliography > file format is _very simple_.
If you are actually interested in those programs, they are distributed under the CDDL license with Heirloom doctools[1]. I haven't tried using them, but they come with a manpage which is dated 2005, so it's probably better than the originals. > [...] > > Also, when entering very long hyperlinks for example in the %O field, > > refer is unable to break the links correctly, even when the link is > > entered within several lines in the bibl database with escapes ("\") > > at the end of the broken lines. The only break point refer seems to > > capture is a hyphen ("-") within the link. Any foreslashes ("/") are > > not detected as possible break points, so any atempt by me to enter a > > hyperlink info which is prompted always correctly, failed. > [...] The fact groff doesn't consider slashes as break points and one has to follow all of them with \: has kind of annoyed me for a while. I think groff would benefit from neatroff's hydash request: hydash CHARS Specify the list of characters after which words may be broken (even when hyphenation is disabled) without inserting hyphens. That allows one to specify / as a potential breaking point to the formatter. ~ onf [1] https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-doctools