Re: [groff] [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"

[E. Hoffmann]

Sat, 2 Sep 2017 18:02:39 -0400 (Peter Schaffter <address@hidden> ):
> On Sat, Sep 02, 2017, Blake McBride wrote:
> > Second, I don't think troff is gaining in popularity.  The contrary is,
> > Lastly, as stated by others, troff has a substantial history.  Significant
> > changes in troff could invalidate most of the old documents leaving troff
> > with no usage base, and a poor tool at rendering all of the troff documents
> > out there.

> When we were drafting a mission statement for groff in 2014, we all
> agreed that backward compatibility would remain a top priority.
> Troff's very long history stands as a functioning proof-of-concept
> that continued backward compatibility is no impediment to the
> contemporary use of software, no matter its age.  Groff needs to
> stick to its guns, if for no other reason than to prove the rest of
> the world wrong in this regard.

I used groff for over two decades because it does it's job.
The markup is logical, the output perfect, and the way
macros are written is just elegant, so principally for me the
proof-of-concept-thing is really convincing.  Some years ago I
wanted to write a complicated script, needing several indexes,
no matter what.  Just smooth. Groff works in a friendly way.

    But.  There is, for me, the font problem.  I need to edit
chinese texts, Werner some years ago gave me the method to use
the fonts, but the paragraph handling in groff still seems to be
not possible, thus there is no way of writing chinese with groff.
The moment groff can cope with chinese fonts, e.g. like XeTeX,
I definitely return to using groff.

    Having read the discussion in this thread, the one&only thing I
need/want (modernizing) groff is the implementation of those greater otf
or truetype fonts of the chinese type.  groff's concept is good.
But these greater fonts are, and will be, needed.  (For guys like me.)

Cheers!  Erich