Re: heirloom eqn (was: [Groff] OTF in Groff or -mom in Heitrloom troff...)

[Gunnar Ritter]

Joerg van den Hoff <address@hidden> wrote:

> and  compare  "geqn/groff"  with  "heqn/htroff" generated ps
> output _and_ with the above document from bell  labs  you'll
> see  especially  that  in  the  original doc the equation is
> typeset with _some_ spacing, different from groff  but  more
> (and better) spacing than by heqn/htroff.

Okay, I now see that I introduced that problem myself back
in November 2007; eqn produces a \^ where it should produce
a \|. I'll find a way to make that work properly and tell
you when it's done.

> > In general, geqn goes more into the direction of TeX and
> > tries to more automatically layout the formulas, whereas
> > the old eqn on which Heirloom eqn is based requires manual
> > interaction in many places. However, documents on which
> > such hand-tuning is applied would not get formatted as
> > intended if Heirloom eqn did the same. Thus, I will keep
> > it as is; I also regard it as a good thing if the two
> > programs keep a different approach to formula typesetting.
>
> the latter is fine with me (although I don't think that geqn
> is much more "automatic" than the original one).

That's what the geqn manual page describes in its usage
section as "automatic spacing", at least. I never looked
into its source code so I cannot tell you how much of a
difference it actually makes.

> seem's  not  to be true if I don't do something silly wrong.
> with the above example formula (say in file "tt") and
>
> geqn tt | groff -ms > tt.ps
> heqn tt | htroff -ms | dpost > tt2.ps
> geqn tt | htroff -ms | dpost > tt3.ps
>
> only  the  first  two work. the third produces an empty page
> when viewed in `gv'.

I see, I was wrong, it actually needs -mg (the groff
compatibility macros) to work.

Gunnar