Re: pdfroff in groff 1.23.0.rc3 changes compared to 1.22.4

[Michał Kruszewski]

I use pdfroff only because of 2 reasons.
If you know how to do the same with groff I would even prefer to use groff 
instead:

1. ToC. I haven't managed to generate ToC with groff at the beginning of the 
document.
I do not ask for a lot.
Just print me the info about header pages (stdout or file) and I will easily 
generate ToC with Perl/Python script and Makefile target.
I guess it is currently not possible?

2. PDF meta data.
pdfroff has .pdfinfo, how to achieve the same with groff?


Best regards,
Michał Kruszewski


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------- Original Message -------
On Tuesday, April 4th, 2023 at 6:13 PM, G. Branden Robinson 
<g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:


> At 2023-04-04T13:48:39+0000, Michał Kruszewski wrote:
> 
> > Thanks for you response Branden.
> > I use ms.
> 
> 
> Aha, thanks! I started trying to construct a reproducer using mm, then
> noticed how terrible our description of the "TC" macro in the
> groff_mm(7) man page is, so I've undertaken to improve it.
> 
> A bonus for the forthcoming groff 1.23.0.rc4, perhaps...
> 
> > Fortunately, the document with Makefile is available on github:
> > https://github.com/Functional-Bus-Description-Language/Specification.
> > You can easily compile the document by simply executing make. Version
> > compiled with 1.22.4 is even available in .pdf format in the
> > repository.
> 
> 
> At a quick look I think the problems involve the use of pdfroff.
> 
> If I try to format your document for PostScript using groff 1.22.4, I
> get lots of problems as well. Worse ones, in fact. I see that the
> header margin is reduced to zero, the cover page doesn't appear at all,
> the typeface isn't restored in some places (it gets "stuck in Courier"),
> and so on.
> 
> Part of this, I suspect, can be chalked up to pdfroff performing some
> initialization of the ms(7) macro package behind the scenes, relieving
> the user of that responsibility.
> 
> If I'm correct, then unfortunately this means that pdfroff may make an
> ms(7) document seem valid when in fact it is not. Your input looks
> carefully composed, so I am hopeful that there is a simple fix, but I
> tried some work-arounds, sprinkling calls of internal ms(7) "@init" and
> "par@init" macros around in various places, and those didn't
> significantly improve the situation. (In one case I did get the header
> margin back. But I'd hate to recommend those as anything more than
> emergency workarounds; calling ms(7) internals from a document is to be
> discouraged.)
> 
> Furthermore, pdfroff author Keith Marshall is no longer maintaining it
> as part of the groff distribution. He has a new site for it
> https://osdn.net/users/keith/pf/groff‐pdfmark/wiki/FrontPage. It
> 
> could be that that version does not exhibit these problems, but I don't
> follow its development, as groff itself keeps my hands full.
> 
> This was a fairly late-breaking change in groff 1.23.0's (very long)
> release cycle, so we haven't decided yet if we want to simply withdraw
> pdfroff (technically, the contrib/pdfmark directory in the sources) from
> future versions of groff, or maintain our own version. (We might have a
> volunteer for the latter but I haven't gotten an update from them
> lately.) The plan had been to defer this decision until after 1.23.0's
> final release, but if a lot of "pdfroff -mspdf"-using documents are
> going to go haywire, we may need to make the decision sooner. Or at
> least warn pdfroff users of this possibility in the release
> announcement.
> 
> > I have checked both PAGE=A4 and PAGE=letter and it looks like there is
> > no difference.
> 
> 
> Yes, I no longer think the page format has much to do with the problems
> you're seeing. (It might constitute a minor additional issue on top of
> the much worse ones that are evident.)
> 
> I was about to start bisecting our repo so I could at least see where
> pdfroff or groff ms changes started to make things go wrong, but
> disappointingly, in spite of its claim for support of groff's "-a"
> option in its man page, pdfroff does not in fact support it.[1] I was
> going to use that to try to speed the evaluation process at each stage
> of the bisection. Since there have been over 4,500 commits to the groff
> Git repository since 1.22.4 was tagged, bisections can be lengthy.
> 
> I'll have to think a bit about the best way to attack this problem.
> 
> I'm open to suggestions from the mailing list.
> 
> Regards,
> Branden
> 
> [1] observe: echo "hello, world" | pdfroff -a