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Groff vs Heirloom troff (was Re: Quick question: how to do .index in gro


From: Dave Kemper
Subject: Groff vs Heirloom troff (was Re: Quick question: how to do .index in groff?)
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2020 07:24:34 -0500

> > By the way, is it a goal of groff to support the Heirloom Troff extensions?
>
> Nope, more like the other way around. Groff is the dominant Troff
> implementation these days, so it behoves Heirloom Troff to support the more
> commonly-used extensions.

It's not a question of which implementation has the bigger market
share, but which has the richer feature set.  Currently each of them
can do things the other can't.

There's no general goal of implementing all Heirloom features that
groff is missing, but I too would like to see this happen (and vice
versa on the Heirloom side).  It would greatly benefit portability and
interoperability if we could regard useful extensions as part of the
modern roff language, rather than as groff- or Heirloom-specific
features.  (There would still need to be a macro package to spackle
over differences in features common to both packages but accessed with
different syntax, e.g., .tkf vs .track.)

Anyone interested in groff's long-term goals should check out its
mission statement
(http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/groff-mission-statement.html),
crafted after much discussion on this list several years ago.  Three
core improvements it mentions for groff -- using a paragraph-at-once
formatting algorithm, and natively understanding modern fonts and
character encodings -- are already in Heirloom.  That groff cannot do
the first at all, and requires external helpers (one of them not even
shipped with the package) for the latter two, ironically makes it look
more outdated than its "heirloom" counterpart.



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