Re: [Groff] Sun's troff now available

[Peter Schaffter]

On Mon, Jun 26, 2006, Ted Harding wrote:
> > [Peter's fascinating tour of the Typesetting Museum snipped]

Makes me sound like a fossil. :)

> I have to agree with this.  Whenever I have wanted to produce
> fine-tuned output, I wait until I'm sure the document is in final
> form. <snip> Then you can interpolate troff requests/macros to
> make the adjustments you want, on a line-by-line basis, where
> needed.

Exactly the procedure I use.  And not one I mind.  In fact, I
expect it.  Good typesetting always requires a judicious eye and
manual intervention.  However, the amount of intervention required
by groff on a line-by-line basis can sometimes get out of hand
(think "narrow measure columns").

> Once again, I suspect that all this kind of thing could be
> helped by pre-output access to the finally formatted output
> line (since the mechanism I describe above amounts to this,
> but riding a mule to climb the mountain rather than taking the
> helicopter).

Good analogy.

FWIW, back in the Museum, even though galleys were set from
what amounted to "source files", the workstations had a
continuously updating "status line" that told you exactly where
you were, both vertically on the galley and horizontally on the
currently-being-input line (measured from the position of the cursor
in the input text).  By keeping an eye on the status line, you could
make a lot of judgment calls concerning where to break troublesome
lines, how much kerning to apply, etc. during the first run.

I'm wondering if this is the kind of "pre-output access" you're
envisaging.  Hard to imagine how groff could implement it in
user-space, nice though it would be.  Seems to me it would require a
specialized front end.

-- 
Peter Schaffter