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From: | Larry Kollar |
Subject: | Re: [Groff] gtroff & soelim don't recognize ~ in paths |
Date: | Mon, 10 Apr 2006 22:11:48 -0400 |
Miklos Somogyi wrote:
Ditto. Environment variables too. Everything valid to the shell, should be valid to groff.Why? User convenience. Shouldn't this be consideration No 1? Slight problems: which shell, what OS?
That's exactly the point. I can't believe I'm the first to mention this as a problem in 35 years of *roff's existence. But with groff being cross-platform, ~ might not mean anything to a W32 user. I think using \V[HOME] to pull the home directory from the environment is reasonably portable.
I would rather pay for a thoroughly modern implementation of troff that only inherits the wonderful original ideas but not the constraints of the original times.
Well, groff eliminated what I would consider the biggest constraint of the original: the two-character namespace. The second biggest is Unicode support, and that has both a current workaround and a real fix in CVS. Other things like TOC, Index, cross-references, and bitmap graphic support are supported through long-established workflows, without excess baggage where such things aren't needed.
What do you see as major constraints with groff at this time? -- Larry Kollar k o l l a r @ a l l t e l . n e t Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival" http://unixtext.org/
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