Greetings. On Sun, 28 Oct 2012 17:37:27 +0100 Luis Anaya <papoan...@hotmail.com> wrote: > 1. This deserves some explanation: > > If you were going to translate Troff commands for email , would you > typeset these into... > > [...] > > d. Text - Looking at man pages, it adds a lot of terminal commands, it > would not look nice in email.
Well, only needed is a subset to align text on a line, add some lines, format a table in UTF‐8 characters, do some lists, maybe handle the ref‐ erences automatically in an e‐mail friendly way. Troff has implemented much more than a simple hack would approach. > e. HTML that's probably the "better" choice to typeset *output* for > email from troff considering the alternatives. No, never. HTML is ugly, has too many side‐effects, does not have just two‐character commands, like most of troff has and it requires a whole day to align right. Next will be people wanting CSS, Javascript and video files. If you add features for stupid users you will get stupid users. > Yes, "but why don't you write in plain text". Good question. Because running a justify script using troff is faster than me adding the whitespaces manually. > >> On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 01:21:40PM +0100, hiro wrote: > >> > typesetting? raw text can be typeset just fine with a keyboard. not > >> > sure what you're really up to. > >> > > >> > >> It is suckless answer to HTML email. > >> > > It might as well *be* HTML email. > > Because it is. A rose of any other name is... Adding HTML anywhere is not nice to the reader. You *need* a webbrowser, which sucks up the CPU, RAM, yout time, space and lifetime. Every devel‐ oper implementing forced HTML frontends should be charged for the damage they did to the environment – for the rest of their life. The next prob‐ lem is, like said above, that HTML sucks in too many dependencies people will want to have. I have never seen any troff5 effort to add video and audio markup; which is a good thing. I’ve heard the first »software complexity crime against humanity« charges have been brought up in front of The Hague. Sincerely, Christoph Lohmann
