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

[John Gardner]

>
> 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 ironically makes it look more outdated than its "heirloom" counterpart.


What I find laughable as that neither of them support right-to-left
languages, which is a pretty embarrassing shortcoming for typesetting
software to have. Neatroff comes to the rescue on that front, so... we're
basically looking at unifying *three* major implementations. ;-) Or, you
know, we could not unify anything and simply document their differences
instead.

On Sun, 26 Jul 2020 at 22:24, Dave Kemper <saint.snit@gmail.com> wrote:

> > > By the way, is it a goal of groff to support the Heirloom Troff
> extensions?
> >
> > Nope, more like the other way around. Groff is the dominant Troff
> > implementation these days, so it behoves Heirloom Troff to support the
> more
> > commonly-used extensions.
>
> It's not a question of which implementation has the bigger market
> share, but which has the richer feature set.  Currently each of them
> can do things the other can't.
>
> There's no general goal of implementing all Heirloom features that
> groff is missing, but I too would like to see this happen (and vice
> versa on the Heirloom side).  It would greatly benefit portability and
> interoperability if we could regard useful extensions as part of the
> modern roff language, rather than as groff- or Heirloom-specific
> features.  (There would still need to be a macro package to spackle
> over differences in features common to both packages but accessed with
> different syntax, e.g., .tkf vs .track.)
>
> 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 more outdated than its "heirloom" counterpart.
>
>