Re: Putting UTF-8 in grout (was: ripgrep author seems happy with groff_man_style(7))

[onf]

On Wed Jan 22, 2025 at 12:14 AM CET, onf wrote:
> On Tue Jan 21, 2025 at 11:39 PM CET, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > At 2025-01-21T22:31:44+0100, onf wrote:
> [...]
> > > Given how difficult adding full Unicode support to groff, and
> > > contributing to the formatter in general, seems to be, I think a more
> > > likely scenario might be that I patch neatroff to support all the
> > > groff extensions I rely on, and switch to it instead.[1]
> >
> > If you find Ali and his work a less seductive target for your
> > derogations, that outcome might be a Pareto improvement.
> [...]

It took me a while to understand what you mean.

neatroff is arguably not perfect, but I find its source code (and build
system!) much more sensible. What remains to be seen is whether he will
be open to my additions or whether I will have to maintain them myself.

His implementation of troff seems closer in spirit to the original
(until recently it didn't have evc, for instance), so I'm not sure
whether he wants groff inventions such as being able to diagnose
interpolation of unset registers.

I'm sorry for possibly being too negative towards groff. Don't get me
wrong, I find a lot of it really valuable, I just don't have much
tolerance for the sort of nonsense (or historical baggage?) that GNU
projects tend to accumulate.

~ onf