Re: [groff] A typo on fsf groff wiki page, and question about releasing

[John Gardner]

Last year I used JavaScript and Web technologies to create an interactive,
high-quality rendition of gropdf's output. I implemented this as a
postprocessor with hand-written transition tables which all a single-pass
through the raw DITROFF output (the "intermediate representation")  For
Deri Jane's gropdf macros, a few additional passes were needed to  identify
PDFMark features (mainly bookmarked headings and clickable "hotspots")..
I'm digressing now, I won't bore you guys with the details.

Point is, my project was *right* in the throes of completion, before my
poor old MacBook died. So I've moved to OpenBSD 6.1
<https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2346707/34102859-c21b026e-e43e-11e7-886b-afc8db1cbab2.jpg>
as
was planned for ages. I love OpenBSD, although it wasn't kind to my
attempts to build *Atom* <https://atom.io/> or *Electron*
<https://electronjs.org/>, or even an up-to-date build of *Node 9.3.0*
<https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/10904>. Somebody on OpenBSD's ports
team will need to create ports for them I guess. Emacs is keeping me
company for the time being, at least. :)

Those interested in my work can dig through everything at
https://github.com/Alhadis/Roff.js (libraries for marrying the worlds of
modern web technologies to a 40+-year old typesetting system). The finished
material will be used to implement live-updating previews of Roff as you're
working on it, via the language package
<https://github.com/Alhadis/language-roff> I originally wrote.

Since these are pure, standardised web technologies well-supported by
modern browsers, it'd be trivial to refactor my work so one can view
graphically typeset output as they work. The biggest hurdle is making Groff
(or any other *full *Troff implementation) available to pipe the
preprocessed and processed page elements to the JS-based postprocessor.

Which is why porting Groff's codebase to JavaScript is making it seem more
and more like such a great idea...


On 10 Jan 2018 1:26 am, "Larry Kollar" <address@hidden> wrote:



> John Gardner <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> I'm wondering how many people here might react if I suggested porting the
> entire Geoff codebase to JavaScript…

LOL go for it! I often joked that nothing useful was ever written in
Javascript.
That hasn’t been true for a while, but it would be cool to see how you
handle
the command-line options, pre- and post-processors, and so on.

        Larry