Re: [Groff] Three topics related to images

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

>   - provides sensible float handling
>   - can be captioned and labelled

Wouldn't it be useful to split off that functionality into
a separate float handler, to have available also for tables
and pic diagrams, and provide a bare-bones PDF image includer
à la PSPIC instead?


> It would be exceptionally nice if groff natively handled
> images in formats other than ps and pdf, but I don't think
> that's going to happen any time soon.  For now, it's .ps,
> or .pdf, or nothing.  Not a huge issue with 'convert'.

True.  For vector graphics, there really isn't much choice --
you have PS/PDF and SVG (and some not-so-often used formats
such as HPGL and CGM and various CAD formats), so you
just stick to the most common and support that.  For raster
graphics there's quite a large number of commonly used formats
(GIF, PNG, JPEG, PBM/PGM/PPM, TIFF, BMP, ...) and it seems
rather ambitious to support them all.  I'd probably vote for
keeping groff small and doing the conversion with specialized
external programs instead.  Performing conversions on-the-fly
by repeatedly calling external programs while running groff
strikes me as wasteful, since I'd be formatting a document
quite a number of times while writing it, and I'd probably
be too impatient to wait the extra few seconds...