Bonjour, Pierre-Jean, I don't know much about vgrind, but the English word "grind" is a verb that describes what you do to beef to get ground beef (aka hamburger) or to grain to get flour. Given that "ground" is the past tense of grind, it does look like it comes from the Anglo-Saxon or other Germanic roots of English rather than the French, doesn't it?
The man page says vgrind was created in 1991 and I don't think "virtual" was terribly chic then... I'm thinking it is more likely that the "v" stands for "visual" as in vi... Which also makes me wonder what the "m" in "vim" means... Ah, the Wikipaedia article about vi says that vim is vi iMproved... Thinking back to how Unix people talked back then, I'm inclined to think that the "edpr" part of vfontedpr stands for edit-print. So this makes this visual-font-edit-and-print, which seems to be more or less what it does. That is one of the longer command/program names from the days when we used ASCII characters to do online art ;-) Maybe others have better information... My remarks are based on wild-eyed speculation only... meg >________________________________ > From: Pierre-Jean <sy...@ombres.eu> >To: groff@gnu.org >Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2012 3:02 AM >Subject: [Groff] Vgrind and vfontedpr > > >Hello alls, > >You maybe remember that vgrind is an old pre-processor for >troff that colorize source code. It's a shell script that >call a C progamm named vfontedpr. > >I'm trying to understand what those names means. In french, >to grind means « grincer » and « mouliner ». Does that mean >that vgrind does a difficult job? > >It seems that vfontedpr has something to do with « font », >since it adds font definition inside code. Does that mean >that within vfontedpr, a programm ( « pr » ) is « fonted » ? > >Last but not least, what's the meaning of that « v » ? Is it >for « virtual » ? > >As you can see, these questions are absolutely essentials. I >hope that a good english speaker could explain me what does >that mean. > >Cheers, > >Pierre-Jean. > > > >
