Hi Ralph, > Support of modern font technologies and of course languages which aren't left-to-right.
Agreed. But for everything else you've mentioned: it's just a matter of writing another PDF postprocessor (or some other adapter for a particular format). Postprocessors are where the real beauty of Troff's staying power shines. > but the modern graphics model of PDF has moved on a lot from theirs and isn't targeted. Images and SVG as first-class objects. Transformation matrices. Advanced colour handling. Text-flow layout. PDF's graphics model hasn't changed, and SVG isn't a first class object in PDF documents. Are you conflating it with web browsers and HTML/CSS? Because that's a completely different beast to PDF… On Wed, 25 May 2022 at 21:13, Ralph Corderoy <ra...@inputplus.co.uk> wrote: > Hi Igno, > > > We actually do have partial control over a significant portion of > > existing manual pages, by virtue of some relevant people participating > > in the list <groff@gnu.org>. > ... > > Admittedly and for good reasons, huge numbers of individual, portable > > software packages also provide manual pages, and we have no direct > > access to the developers of those. Then again, when those people > > I take your point, but I think your outlook is biased to the > free-software operating systems. In addition to the man pages of the > many individual projects, which you acknowledged, there's also the > commercial OS like AIX. Not forgetting Humm's Plan 9. :-) > > > Regarding new text formatters and markup languages, i don't see much > > need for them. Over the decades, most other attempts turned out much > > worse than ROFF and LaTeX, including practically all that are > > significantly younger > > I agree if it were just to be another troff or Lout, but the modern > graphics model of PDF has moved on a lot from theirs and isn't targeted. > Images and SVG as first-class objects. Transformation matrices. > Advanced colour handling. Text-flow layout. Support of modern font > technologies and of course languages which aren't left-to-right. More > DTP like https://www.scribus.net than academic paper. There's lots of > experimentation which could be done to see if a textual language which > allowed straightforward text entry would have use with today's printing. > > Sometimes it's right to start from scratch and to allow much more > breaking change as different approaches are tried. Again, we're back to > Plan 9. > > -- > Cheers, Ralph. > >
