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Re: [Groff] \F request?


From: Sigfrid Lundberg, NetLab
Subject: Re: [Groff] \F request?
Date: Sun, 7 Apr 2002 12:02:34 +0200 (CEST)

On Fri, 5 Apr 2002, Jon Snader wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 05, 2002 at 06:08:09PM +0200, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

...

> > Unfortunately, I would then have to change the family name for
> > Palatino to, say, `PA' to free the letter `P'.
> >
> > Opinions?
> >
>
> Hi Werner,

....

> I'm sure that you *can* think of those uses, and that they might be
> useful for macro writers, but at the end of the day, groff is really
> only useful to its *users*, and we should respect their needs foremost.

I can find a number of potential end-user applications of this, regardless
of whether one would be using the new \F escape or the old .fam request

.fam XX
... things ...
.fam P \# as in previous would work

and the things inbetween would use generic .R, .B and .I marcros (or
whatever they might be called in different macro packages

Or using escapes:

I start in Times Roman, But then I change my mind: \F(XXThis is Roman in
font family XX. \fIWhereas this is italics in the same family. \fPAfter a
bit of Roman in XX\FP I return to Times Roman.

Methinks it looks like a clever, simple and useful extension.

> Since I only seem to write to disagree with one of your proposals, let
> me say again how much I appreciate the work that you and the other
> developers are doing.  The proof of your good work and ideas is that I
> don't write more often.

I agree strongly, and I also agree with your caution against
incompatibility with older documents. I suppose that the fact that I
don't have any documents from the past that I still maintains make me
more prone to accept novelties.

This raises a number of questions as to the goals of groff maintenance.
Some people care about the 'formattability' of old manual pages. Other
people care about the 'formattability' of other texts they've written in
the past. A third category of people care of about texts not yet written.
And Werner et al. usually skillfully care about all three categories.

In principle, we have today three text formatting packages, TeX, Lout, and
groff. Some say that we only need TeX, but its licensing scheme is very
special and restrictive (if the reimplementing-TeX-in-java initiative is
progressing with the same speed as these people update their web pages,
then it isn't going very fast), and TeX architecture is extremely
monolithic. So is Lout architecture (I have to confess that I know very
little about Lout, though).

These considerations tells me that groff developers need to think
about the future, since groff combines a fairly modern source code with
reasonable licensing and a modular design.

Being an evolutionary biologist by training, I'd like to make the
following metaphore: Groff is adopting a generalist strategy. It's a
Jack-Of-All-Trades formatter, and as such it will never be very good at
various specialist tasks, but one would expect that it should be able to
survive and develop in a changing environment. And that's indeed an
asset.


Sigge







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