Re: .TQ to replace .PD 0

[John Gardner]

Hi Ralph,

> Support of modern font technologies and of course languages which aren't
left-to-right.

Agreed. But for everything else you've mentioned: it's just a matter of
writing another PDF postprocessor (or some other adapter for a particular
format). Postprocessors are where the real beauty of Troff's staying power
shines.

> but the modern graphics model of PDF has moved on a lot from theirs and
isn't targeted. Images and SVG as first-class objects.  Transformation
matrices. Advanced colour handling.  Text-flow layout.

PDF's graphics model hasn't changed, and SVG isn't a first class object in
PDF documents. Are you conflating it with web browsers and HTML/CSS?
Because that's a completely different beast to PDF…


On Wed, 25 May 2022 at 21:13, Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi Igno,
>
> > We actually do have partial control over a significant portion of
> > existing manual pages, by virtue of some relevant people participating
> > in the list <groff@gnu.org>.
> ...
> > Admittedly and for good reasons, huge numbers of individual, portable
> > software packages also provide manual pages, and we have no direct
> > access to the developers of those.  Then again, when those people
>
> I take your point, but I think your outlook is biased to the
> free-software operating systems.  In addition to the man pages of the
> many individual projects, which you acknowledged, there's also the
> commercial OS like AIX.  Not forgetting Humm's Plan 9.  :-)
>
> > Regarding new text formatters and markup languages, i don't see much
> > need for them.  Over the decades, most other attempts turned out much
> > worse than ROFF and LaTeX, including practically all that are
> > significantly younger
>
> I agree if it were just to be another troff or Lout, but the modern
> graphics model of PDF has moved on a lot from theirs and isn't targeted.
> Images and SVG as first-class objects.  Transformation matrices.
> Advanced colour handling.  Text-flow layout.  Support of modern font
> technologies and of course languages which aren't left-to-right.  More
> DTP like https://www.scribus.net than academic paper.  There's lots of
> experimentation which could be done to see if a textual language which
> allowed straightforward text entry would have use with today's printing.
>
> Sometimes it's right to start from scratch and to allow much more
> breaking change as different approaches are tried.  Again, we're back to
> Plan 9.
>
> --
> Cheers, Ralph.
>
>