Re: [Groff] gtroff & soelim don't recognize ~ in paths

[Larry Kollar]

Miklos Somogyi wrote:

> Ditto. Environment variables too. Everything valid to the shell,  
> should be valid to groff.
> Why? User convenience. Shouldn't this be consideration No 1?
> Slight problems: which shell, what OS?

That's exactly the point. I can't believe I'm the first to mention  
this as a problem in 35 years of *roff's existence. But with groff  
being cross-platform, ~ might not mean anything to a W32 user. I  
think using \V[HOME] to pull the home directory from the environment  
is reasonably portable.

> I would rather pay for a thoroughly modern implementation of troff  
> that only inherits
> the wonderful original ideas but not the constraints of the  
> original times.

Well, groff eliminated what I would consider the biggest constraint  
of the original: the two-character namespace. The second biggest is  
Unicode support, and that has both a current workaround and a real  
fix in CVS. Other things like TOC, Index, cross-references, and  
bitmap graphic support are supported through long-established  
workflows, without excess baggage where such things aren't needed.

What do you see as major constraints with groff at this time?

--
Larry Kollar     k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival"
http://unixtext.org/