Hi Deri, At 2022-11-17T00:12:40+0000, Deri wrote: > On Wednesday, 16 November 2022 23:04:52 GMT G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > I don't see why "rm -rf /usr/share/groff/1.23.0/font/devps" should > > cause "groff -Tpdf" to fail or behave differently in any way. Do > > you? > > I love your little jokes. :-)
_Somebody_ needs to! However in this case I wasn't joking. Although admittedly I am sometimes whimsical in my seriousness. It goes with the instinctive iconoclasm... > If you do the rm you suggest, groff won't fail, well it will if you > run groff without a -T option. ..._if_ groff hasn't been configured to select something else as the default output device. E.g., $ make -j DEVICE=pdf > The sole difference is you will not be able to use freeeuro with pdf > but there are plenty of better glyph alternatives. It's obviously my day to dredge things out of earlier private mails I sent. :D Back in March I mused about how it would be nice if we could fill in the groff_char(7) gaps in glyph coverage for PostScript and PDF. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2022-03/msg00016.html If we did that, and grouped them together in a "groff symbols" font, then we could with as much justice include the Euro signs from FreeEuro and supersede that font with this new one. > You will have a much more serious problem, man -t will not work at > all. Sadly I don't think a lot of people use man -t. But as I understand it, man(1)'s '-t' option means to format the out for "troff"--that is, a typesetter, and send the result to the standard output. There is no presumption about the nature of the typesetter itself. > In my mind grops is the senior service, gropdf the illegitimate child, > because grops is a dependency of the man program. I feel this is exaggerated; it both understands the capabilities and importance of gropdf, and is overly specific about what, exactly, man(1) requires. > This is why nearly everyone packages grops as part of core groff > package (required if you install man) and gropdf is consigned to the > full fat groff package. That may be due to the Perl dependency more than any other factor. > So in reality you will find grops without gropdf, but never t’other > way round. Whatever its merits, PostScript has been on its way out for 25 years. I don't mean to hasten its demise but I don't want to be yoked to it when that demise occurs. > And if you are using rm -rf as the root user you deserve to find out > that things can be a bit different, you naughty boy. I was using that to concisely express the whims of a sysadmin who built groff from source, and to reflect the arrangement of a putative packaging arrangement that provided groff's PDF support in the absence of its PostScript support. Regards, Branden
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