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

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