Re: [Groff] Colours & smart quotes

[Larry Kollar]

Werner LEMBERG wrote:

>> I believe that Knuth wrote TeX as an elaborate joke. [...]
>
>You are exaggerating, arent' you? :-) TeX's typographical capabilities
>are *far* better than groff's [...]

I was thinking more about the syntax; it looks so much like RTF.
(Yes, I'm aware that TeX predates RTF, but still.) When I used
troff on the job, interspersing markup with text didn't get in
the way since the markup was so quick to type. (La)TeX is too
verbose for that kind of workflow.

On the other hand, you can use LyX as a nice graphical frontend
to LaTeX -- if you can tolerate the inflexibility of LaTeX's
layouts.


>> I'd meant to ask if anyone had worked up a solution to orphans.
>
>As mentioned in another mail, this support already exists (but is
>neither documented nor tested due to lack of time).  If you compile
>groff with -DWIDOW_CONTROL, you'll get two new requests `wdc'
>(activate widow control) and `fpl' (flush pending lines) which
>prohibits widows.

[Making mental note to try this today.]
I must have missed that mail, and I thought I'd scoured the
archives pretty well when I first found ffii.org.


>> Speaking as a technical writer, the other big problem with groff is
>> that the public macro packages were around when the Sphinx still had
>> a nose. :-) ...
>
>Talking of modern groff macro packages you might have a look at the
>current groff snapshot

[Second mental note.]
That was my first thought when I saw -mdoc, the BSD'ers are
giving manpages a much-needed update.

        Larry