Re: [Groff] quasi device independence of intermediate output

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Classical (di)troff had a very strange kind of device independence.
> troff output for some device could be handled by an arbitrary other
> postprocessor device.  This seems to have been done by a scaling of
> all arguments in basic units by the ratio of the resolution of the
> inflicted devices.  Apart from rounding errors, this seemed to have
> worked.
> 
> Basically, groff does not support this.  It might be not too hard to
> implement this.  The right place for this is the output parser.  The
> name of the postprocessor's native device would be a global variable
> that is used by the parser to determine a resolution quotient.  That
> would be applied to the suitable commands within the browser.  The
> device name in the intermediate output document could then be
> discarded and the postprocessor device name be used instead.  This
> could enable even the processing of very old devices, e.g. "post",
> without knowing their other parameters or fonts.
> 
> Does this concept make sense?

Basically yes, but I think there are more important issues than this
to resolve right now.  Additionally, I don't have original UNIX troff
for testing.


    Werner