Re: Groff vs Heirloom troff (was Re: Quick question: how to do .index in groff?)

[Richard Morse]

> On Jul 26, 2020, at 8:24 AM, Dave Kemper <saint.snit@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Anyone interested in groff's long-term goals should check out its
> mission statement
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/groff-mission-statement.html),
> crafted after much discussion on this list several years ago.  Three
> core improvements it mentions for groff -- using a paragraph-at-once
> formatting algorithm, and natively understanding modern fonts and
> character encodings -- are already in Heirloom.  That groff cannot do
> the first at all, and requires external helpers (one of them not even
> shipped with the package) for the latter two, ironically makes it look
> more outdated than its "heirloom" counterpart.

Which is the external helper that lets it natively understand modern fonts? 
That would be huge!

My primary interest in roff is as a text language for creating nice PDFs, and 
the current font situation is abysmal. I use Heirloom for some stuff, but the 
fact that it’s not a package available on most OSs and requires custom 
installation limits what I can use it for…

Thanks,
Ricky