Re: [Groff] Status of the portability work, and plans for the future

[Eric S. Raymond]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden>:
> > Looking at my code, I see there is one more exception; troff \*(an,
> > horizontal arrow extension, can't be mapped either.  You'd think
> > there'd be an ISO entity for this somewhere in the AMSA arrow set,
> > but there isn't.  Nor have I found a Unicode equivalent.
> 
> U+23AF HORIZONTAL LINE EXTENSION

Oh, *good*.  It's supported now.

You wouldn't happen to know of mappings for the bracket pile 
graphics, would you?
 
> Inspite of the bad rendering of groffer.1 with KDE, nobody has
> complained.

Now that I've seen the code behind it, I think this is probably
because they've been stunned into numb acceptance by the viewer's high
failure rate.  No, I'm not joking, and no, this is not a good thing.
 
> > [...] it's still improving; I just added code to parse ad-hoc tables
> > made with .ta and tabs rather than TBL markup, and I think I'm going
> > to be able to bite a large corner off of the .ti problem next.
> 
> Aaah.

Yes.  I can't completely solve the .ti problem, it's going to have to
stay in the non-portable set, but I handle some common .ti cliches 
better than I do.

> I'll fix the rest of groff in due course.  However, this might only
> happen after we've defined (and coded) the proposed man macro
> extensions.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  We should try to
get something out in time for the FC7 freeze.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>