A Modern Typesetting Language. (Was: .TQ to replace .PD 0)

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi John,

> > 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.

One could look at shoehorning evermore complexity through to the
post-processor, but that denies integration with the rest of troff of
the expressiveness of those features.  Or at best, gives it through some
clunky ‘treat it as a string’ mechanism.  Think more of a language were
expressions can have these as first-class things with powerful
operators.

> > 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

>From memory, PDF 1.3 added transitioning between colours, PDF 1.4
introduced transparency, and PDF 1.7 gave us 3D artwork.  There must be
many more incremental improvements.  :-)

> and SVG isn't a first class object in PDF documents.

No, I know.  I was meaning they would be in a new document-layout
language.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.