Re: [Groff] OT: Fork of the Heirloom Documentation Tools for fixing bugs

[Dan Plassche]

Glad to hear that the heirloom doctools are still being supported with
bugfixes.  Thanks for this Carsten!

I like being able to use groff pretty much everywhere to produce good
looking documents and appreciate that the program is still being developed
by an active community.   However, all my systems also have heirloom's
ditroff installed, so I thought I would give a few use cases and reasons
below.

>From a design standpoint I like that almost all of the doctools are coded
in C and use separate standalone binaries for different commands.  You can
tune them fairly easily, such as in setting the tmp file location for troff.

The heirloom refer implementation with lookbib and sortbib is more robust
than the groff version, but groff's tbl seems more reliable on long tables.

I personally find that the Unicode support and the otf font handling are
the clear wins in using the heirloom doctools.  The paragraph at once
adjustment also noticeably improves page layout on nroff and troff.

Additionally, the output with the traditional macro packages and without
paragraph at once formatting is close to CAT troff (including the enhanced
BSD versions), which makes sense and proves useful with historical
documents like old man pages.

Thanks,

Dan Plassche
 On Aug 19, 2014 5:29 PM, "Carsten Kunze" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Since I know this list has some members who also use the Heirloom
> Documentation Tools ...
>
> There are some bugs in this troff implementaion which made them nearly
> unusable at least for me. Since there seems to be no chance that Gunnar
> Ritter (the former maintainer) will work again on this tools I have forked
> the repository
>
> from http://heirloom.cvs.sourceforge.net/heirloom/heirloom-doctools/
>
> to https://github.com/carsten-kunze/heirloom-doctools
>
> with the purpose to fix bugs.  There are already some bugs fixed (see
> CHANGES):
>
> * Crashes on OpenBSD reported in 2009
> (
> http://openbsd.7691.n7.nabble.com/Heirloom-troff-on-OpenBSD-4-4-libc-i386-td82865.html
> )
> but never got fixed (AFAIK)
>
> * eqn(1) crashes on 64 bit
>
> * Bugs regarding:
> - ! operator of .if
> - \fP after \fS
> - 'bp followed by ..
> (The last one is also in DWB and Plan9.)
>
> Something not so OT: I did many test with groff, DWB, Heirloom and Plan9
> (only the ditroff functionality).  For any of these groff had equal or
> better results and is the only implementation without bugs (regarding these
> tests).
>
> --Carsten
>
>