Follow-up Comment #8, bug#62921 (group groff):
[comment #7 comment #7:]
> [comment #1 comment #1:]
> > groff's _ms_ and _me_ have support for bold-italic already (and have
> > for decades), and it wouldn't be hard to add it to our _mm_ either;
>
> This has been filed as bug #65241.
Thanks (to whoever that anonymous submitter was ;-) )!
> [comment #5 comment #5:]
> > Ideally, distributors like Fedora and Debian would have "package
> > triggers", scripts that hook up the plumbing between TrueType
> > fonts installed on the system, and the _grops_ and _gropdf_
> > output drivers. But even after almost 30 years this has never
> > happened. The reason may be that the specialized knowledge
> > required is fairly scarce,
>
> Other possible reasons:
> * Supporting groff for anything other than displaying man pages on
> terminals has never been a high priority / something that distro
> managers are even aware it can do.
Fair point. Maybe in the 1.24.0 release announcement we can get a few
more people to wake up and smell the PDF.
> * To be useful, the triggers would have to be bidirectional, running
> whenever a new groff or a new font is installed. While the target
> code could be largely the same, the triggers themselves would be two
> mostly non-overlapping development efforts.
That's not exactly true as I understand it. While RPM had a thing
called "triggers" first, Debian's had them as well for...15 years or
something. And the way they work is that package A can lay a trigger
that any packages B, C, or D will step on it and cause action. (To this
day I'm not sure exactly how triggers work--they came in right after my
heyday of intense involvement with complex package development.) Any
time I install or remove a package that supplies a man page, dpkg
dutifully runs the "man-db" package's trigger afterward.
The scenario I think you're describing is not a trigger--it's just what
in Debian is called a "postinst" script, and those have been around
since practically the first Debian pre-release ever, in 1993 or so.
Before even _my_ time...
However, in working on Robin Haberkorn's recent problem with Russian
documents (bug #65323), I've noticed that some cooperation from
font-providing packages is likely necessary anyway, to solve the problem
of picking a groff font name for installed faces. Should
"LiberationSerif-Regular" be named "LiberationSerifR" or "LSR"?
(Probably the former; continuing AT&T's abbreviation-happy tradition is
likely to lead to collisions.)
Regards,
Branden
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