Hi Jaap, At 2024-10-06T14:54:59+0200, Jaap Akkerhuis wrote: > > On 6 Oct 2024, at 00:22, G. Branden Robinson > > <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Unix nroff got frozen in amber in 1978 with respect to terminal > > support, and continues to live in a world where the termcap and > > terminfo libraries were never written. > > Nroff did actually read in the output description from, if I remember > correctly, /usr/lib/termtab/xxx with the argument -Txxx.
Yes. When Kernighan refactored V7 troff/nroff for device-independence, he implemented a similar scheme for each. While for troff, this resulted in device and font description files, "DESC" and a motley variety of capitalized one-or-two letter names for fonts, for nroff they were termed "driving tables", a terminological choice that concealed how closely they resembled the troff scheme. Compare, for example: https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/blob/master/postscript/devopost/DESC https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/blob/master/postscript/devopost/R with: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V10/cmd/troff/tab.37 https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V10/cmd/troff/tab.450 ...and the family resemblance seems clear. > these where stripped object files. I have heard tell of a "binary format" for Kernighan troff device and font descriptions but never encountered it. groff never attempted to replicate it and I gather that Plan 9 troff also discarded it. > I have made them for Diable daisy-wheel printers. Some could create > bold characters by overprinting and we once had one with two print > heads, the second head had an italics daisy-wheel mounted. Right. The Diablo features heavily in early '80s Unix documentation. However none of this has much to do, in my opinion, with the _terminal capability databases_ offered by termcap and (later) terminfo. The whole point of these is to _query_ the user's terminal type, not have to be told it with some `-T` option. To my knowledge, no nroff has ever simply looked at "$TERM" and then decided how to format output. Approximately all other Unix software that writes to a terminal behaves that way. nroff didn't, and by God some Unix grognards would have it stay that way.[1][2] Mark Nudelman's less(1) is probably the foremost contributor of inertia here, since man(1) is far and away the leading application of nroff(1), and less(1) the victorious pager program after a long and bloody campaign of attrition. (This isn't a complaint; we could have done worse. most(1) could have won instead.[3]) Lennart Jablonka has contributed a patch to groff to resolve this longevous discrepancy. (It ended up on my slow path for integration because I decided I needed to understand terminfo much better, and that in turn led me to contribute a large volume of man page revisions to ncurses, many of which can be enjoyed(?) in its 6.5 release.[4]) https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?63583 Regards, Branden [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=312935 [2] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/729124/linux-9-commands-send-ansi-color-sequences-to-monochrome-terminal [3] https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses-slang.html [4] https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/announce.html https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/ Despite his grognard standpoint with respect to grotty(1)'s default use of SGR escape sequences in output, I would emphasize that Thomas Dickey has been a pleasure to work with. It's difficult to imagine the same being true of Alan Curry.
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