At date and time Thu, 04 Jun 2015 12:32:55 -0700, Greg A. Woods wrote:
| At Thu, 04 Jun 2015 14:53:56 +0200, Johnny Billquist <b...@softjar.se>
wrote:
| Subject: Re: Groff
| >
| > On 2015-06-04 12:44, Robert Swindells wrote:
| > >
| > > Johnny Billquist <b...@softjar.se> 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?
Can Peter Schaffter's mom macros[1] for groff be used with heirloom
troff? These macros turned groff into a much more user-friendly and
powerful typesetting system. The advantage of heirloom troff is that it
does paragraph-at-once formatting while groff is still restricted to
line-at-once formatting. Being able to use the mom macros in heirloom
troff would make for a powerful combination. A tiny memory footprint
producing documents almost on a par with those output by the much
bigger TeX (Thierry Laronde's KerTex excepted, of course!).
[1] http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-01.html
--
Gerard Lally
