Follow-up Comment #11, bug #58946 (project groff):
Hi, Keith!
Yes, I like your proposal for two reasons.
1. As I was porting my updates from groff_ms(7) to doc/ms.ms (whence the
language about the "Groff and Friends HOWTO" originates), I found myself
wincing pretty hard. I thought to myself, "why don't we just offer the user a
pre-rolled solution to this straightforward problem"? I also learned things
about the .XA macro that I never knew because no one had really documented
then. (They're in groff_ms(7) now.)
[I haven't pushed my changes to doc/ms.ms yet--I got distracted because I
finally felt equal to the task of stomping bug #61266.]
2. Dean Allen Provins's "Groff and Friends HOWTO" doesn't seem like a bad
document but it has not been updated in literally 20 years. Even slow-moving
groff has developed in that time, mostly thanks to Werner, Deri, and you.
Moreover, the document is broad-reaching and while I haven't perused it, I'm
pretty nervous about the diverse and deep potential for outdated advice.
> I'm wondering if there may be some justification for incorporation of
simplified versions of each of these, and maybe also a minimal default
implementation of "XH-UPDATE-TOC", within s.tmac?
> What do you think?
I think "yes"! Please go for it. It drives me crazy that we're advising
people to violate the DRY principle with respect to section headings and,
worse, to count tabs.
Simplified is good, and if you have hooks in these simplified versions such
that additional features and coolness and PDF-enhancements spring to life when
-mspdf is specified, that's great!
The only thing I would ask--and it may not be relevant as I have little
familiarity with pdfmark and spdf--is to not wall up _external_ hyperlink
support behind the PDF device. As you probably saw on the groff development
list, the planets are coming into alignment for a generalized, cross-device
hyperlinking facility.
I don't, however, see at this point any way to enable within-document anchors
and links for terminal devices. I'm sure it's not impossible, given things
like addressable scrollback buffers in terminal emulators and less(1)'s
existing ability to seek its input stream, but at present I know of no way to
tell a terminal how to place an anchor, so there's nothing to navigate to. So
that is a problem for another day, and for people like Egmont Koblinger who
have many tentacles to spare for terminal emulation and pager development
communities.
I apologize if that digresses from anything you have in mind.
Regards,
Branden
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