[Groff] Suggestion for images in groff/gpic, current state

[Egil Kvaleberg]

As promised, I've continued to work on the suggestion for implementation
of images in groff. I've tried to digest the impressions of our earlier
discussions, and the proposal attempts to take these into account. I've
also tried to maintain the 'troff feel' as much as possible, which, for
one, should make the new features easy to use. 

The current status is reflected in this document:

        ftp://ftp.kvaleberg.com/pub/image.ps

(There is a pdf also, ftp://ftp.kvaleberg.com/pub/image.pdf)

I am still in a mode where I am emphasising the interface, syntax and
semantics, not the actual implementation. That said, in terms of actual
implementation, it is now in a state where at least the above document
will work as intended, with no particular problems that I can see. I
have tried carefully to implement these features so that the probability
that they will break something else is low. 

Some of the things yet to do is:

  1.    Do more testing/thinking wrt. how to implement images with text
        fill, and also floating images. I am leaning toward a mechanism
        which extends the display concept (as in .DS/.DE) - which would         
be the
most uniform and universal mechanism.

  2.    Do more testing/thinking wrt. how images in tables will/should
        work.   

  3.    Properly implement support for raster image formats in grops. At
        least as a first step, this can be done in much the same way as
        image conversion is done in the html package.

  4.    Better support for the new image feature in html. 

  5.    Gpic support for LaTex images.

  6.    Support for image formats like png, gif, jpeg and tiff.

Issues from 3, 5 and 6 are pretty straight forward, although may be a
bit of work. Since they are not important for the concept, I have chosen
to postpone them.

So it will still be a while before this is ready...

Egil
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