Re: [groff] Fonts, PDF images, groff vs. heirloom troff

[Pierre-Jean Fichet]

Roy Fisher <address@hidden> wrote:
> The changes that resulted from issue #22 were incorporated into n-t-roff
> last year, and it can now produce paragraphs as good as those of the
> leading commercial application, at least in my (possibly slightly
> biased) opinion.

I'm so glad to read these changes are applied. It might be worth closing
the issue (openning a new one if needed), since seeing it openned made
me think the changes were still not applied. And you should have post
an announcement on this list.

> So, if you do decide to revisit n-t-roff and try out
> those new features, I think you might be pleasantly surprised.

I've looked at reffort's doc (1), and I am indeed pleasantly surprised.
N-t-roff has become a tool to create masterpieces of typographic details.
1) https://github.com/reffort/troffmanual/blob/master/troffdoc-mk.pdf

> It still uses output-line traps, though, which sounds like a
> deal-breaker for you.  Output-line traps can be more intricate, but they
> do allow full-paragraph optimization instead of forcing sub-paragraph
> optimization.

For the short story, I had built my macros especially to use heirloom
troff correctly, using output line traps when required. That took
me some effort, but I obviously managed to overcome it, and my
thesis has been printed with these macros. The problem came later,
when I realized how hard it was to understand the resulting code
to apply fixes. The outdated and abandonned code is still online:
https://github.com/pjfichet/utmac/branches

Kind regards,
Pierre-Jean.