Re: Milestone reached: hyperlinked mdoc(7) documents in PDF

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Alex,

At 2024-03-17T23:44:07+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 05:23:20PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Following up my earlier announcement regarding man(7),[1], I'm
> > pleased to report that we have a functioning PDF hyperlink story for
> > the mdoc package.
[...]
> > P.S. Alex, you might want to consider simplifying your cover page
> >      similarly once you bring your copy of groff up to date.
> 
> How much would you consider having a release sooner than expected, and
> then have what originally would have been 1.24.0 be 1.25.0?  :)

Not very much.  As I noted previously, I'm still not the official GNU
maintainer of groff.  (This is partly procrastination and partly
consideration for Bertrand's very tight time budget for GNU work.)

> I would prefer using a packaged version of groff, for two reasons:
> 
> -  I got impedance mismatches, when I see stuff like the 5n base-
>    paragraph indent, but contributors are still seeing 7n.

Fair.  You _can_, of course, configure groff Git to replicate the output
line arrangement of groff 1.23.0 and earlier, with `-rBP=7n -rLL=78n`.

> -  In my server, I have a script that builds the man-pages book for
>    every push to the main branch (true for both the Linux man-pages
>    and shadow), and another that runs the lints and checks for the
>    Linux man-pages.  Having built-from-source software in my computer
>    is less of a problem, but in a server, it's less comfortable.  (I
>    already have Deri's branch in there, and I'm not in love with
>    that.)

You're a good person to ask; is there anything from Deri's branch that
Linux man-pages still needs?  I know it has some stuff you probably
_don't_ need, like the slanted symbol font and a new approach to
associating glyphs in groff font description files with Unicode code
points.

> But yeah, I'm willing to simplify as much as possible!  ;)

I won't pressure you.  If I recall correctly I still owe you another
preliminary to the Most Disruptive Automated Change Ever Unleashed on a
Man Page Corpus ("MR.sed"), that being something to do with man page
cross references inside tbl(1) tables.  I'll have to review the email
thread from January.

By the time I get to it, the argument that groff 1.23 is "too new" will
be pretty feeble...

Regards,
Branden

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