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Re: [Groff] Mission statement


From: Pierre-Jean
Subject: Re: [Groff] Mission statement
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 16:15:21 +0100
User-agent: Heirloom mailx 12.5 7/5/10

Hello groffers,

Before reading further, please remember that I switched from
groff to heirloom troff because groff was missing things
that I need. I nonetheless hope that my opinion might be of
some interest for you.


Peter Schaffter <address@hidden> wrote:

> Here's a draft for a mission statement, based on discussions over
> the past few months.  Comments, please.

I personnaly regret the emphasis on the semantic man and
build system discussions, which obfuscate what I think are
important things for groff. I still remember what Werner
said a few month ago:

>  . Implement TeX's paragraph formatting or something similar - I
>    consider groff's line-oriented paragraph formatting as its weakest
>    point.  See heirloom troff for an example how this could be
>    implemented.
>
>      http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html
>
>  . Update to today's font world.  What groff currently supports
>    natively (PostScript Type 1) is out of date since 15 years.
>    Again, heirloom troff has support for this.
>
>  . Apply zillions of small bug fixes sent to the groff mailing list.
>
>  . Better support of Unicode.

With that in mind, the recent mission statement is a bit
disapointing concerning the text processing mission of
groff:

> Backend
>
> - implementation of the Knuth-Plass linebreaking algorithm with
>   paragraph-at-once formatting; groff currently implements
>   line-at-a-time

Fonts and Unicode are, IMHO, missing here.

And why not mentionning heirloom implementation ? Isn't it
an important reference for anyone wishing to work on these
features ?

Cheers,

Pierre-Jean.




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