Re: Learning troff - where to start?

[Johann Höchtl]

On 14.10.20 18:41, Peter Schaffter wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2020, Johann Höchtl wrote:
> > Groff is certainly feature-rich, stable and polished with
> > great documentation.  But I also value l8n, being able to
> > input utf8-characters directly into the source or easily
> > switch fonts.  Not to mention PAO (paragraph-at-once) from
> > Knuth-Plass.  In that respect both Heirloom and Neatroff are
> > compelling alternatives and it would be great for mom if she would
> > be available there too.
> I haven't inspected either Heirloom or Neatroff closely so I don't
> know how big a job porting would be.  I'm not likely to undertake it
> myself, though if anyone wanted to, I'd be more than happy to act as
> a go-to resource.

In a personal conversation with Deri James he re-introduced me again to 
the mom macro package. So I gave it a whirl and fed neatroff with mom.

I removed the guards checking for groff and version.


Overall errors (neatroff) were:

neatroff: failed to mount <dummy>
neatroff: bad font position 0
neatroff: failed to mount <0>
neatroff: failed to mount <\*[$FONT]>
neatroff: bad font position 0
neatroff: failed to mount <0>
neatroff: failed to mount <\*[$FONT]>

Sounds like recoverable errors of missing fonts. The macro package 
finally failed with

[mom]: Aborting '\n[.F]', line \n[.c].

That sounds rather fatal and even the error message is truncated as I 
think registers, which should keep line numbers or the like, are not set.

Now that particular occurs rather often in mom and I couldn't trace it 
further down. Is there a chance to increase a verbosity level to 
actually see where mom fails?


Best, Johann