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Re: [Groff] Mission statement |
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Sat, 15 Mar 2014 16:15:21 +0100 |
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Heirloom mailx 12.5 7/5/10 |
Hello groffers,
Before reading further, please remember that I switched from
groff to heirloom troff because groff was missing things
that I need. I nonetheless hope that my opinion might be of
some interest for you.
Peter Schaffter <address@hidden> wrote:
> Here's a draft for a mission statement, based on discussions over
> the past few months. Comments, please.
I personnaly regret the emphasis on the semantic man and
build system discussions, which obfuscate what I think are
important things for groff. I still remember what Werner
said a few month ago:
> . Implement TeX's paragraph formatting or something similar - I
> consider groff's line-oriented paragraph formatting as its weakest
> point. See heirloom troff for an example how this could be
> implemented.
>
> http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html
>
> . Update to today's font world. What groff currently supports
> natively (PostScript Type 1) is out of date since 15 years.
> Again, heirloom troff has support for this.
>
> . Apply zillions of small bug fixes sent to the groff mailing list.
>
> . Better support of Unicode.
With that in mind, the recent mission statement is a bit
disapointing concerning the text processing mission of
groff:
> Backend
>
> - implementation of the Knuth-Plass linebreaking algorithm with
> paragraph-at-once formatting; groff currently implements
> line-at-a-time
Fonts and Unicode are, IMHO, missing here.
And why not mentionning heirloom implementation ? Isn't it
an important reference for anyone wishing to work on these
features ?
Cheers,
Pierre-Jean.
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