hello, On Thu, Nov 14, 2024 at 01:30:37PM +0100, Norwid Behrnd wrote: > Dear Branden > > One the papers which cite the `chem` paper by Bentley, Jelinsky, Kernigham I > became aware of is "LITTLE LANGUAGES FOR PICTURES IN AWK" by Bentley. There > is a small section (around figure 7) about `chem`, too -- mirrored/rescued > for example in Arnold Robbin's public `dformat` repository > > <https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/dformat>
I want to share my private history about dformat resurection: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2021-11/msg00008.html Which led to: https://github.com/eiro/dformat/issues/1 then I hacked on some improvements and realized it was gawk which is not the default awk in many unix and we have to stay POSIX. I had too strategies to discuss with the community: * focus on posix awk (testing with busybox awk, mawk and BSD implementations) * revamp the whole thing in perl which is * already a groff rep. * a much better awk than awk (even the g one) I also realized I was unconfortable to touch anything without having a test suite so I was trying to find some existing use of dformat to make sure the rendering was ok. Then covid happened and took me away from the world for a long time … as my health is getting better, I started to read that list again and just saw that hjoertel is now 2 commits ahead my repo but I have to admit I would have commented both of them * ERROR should be a global command to pipe in * $* should be "$@" * gawk should be removed I had no more need for the tool for the moment but I really think adding a version and shipping it as a debian/guix/alpine package should be a really simple but helpful thing and if someone know how to dig on archives to create a test suite, I will be really happy to help improving the existing base so we can have extensions to add colors when \(.g is set. > For now, it is not a spontaneous agreement on my side to work on the code > because it has been for a quite long time I did not write Perl. Perl is one of my favorite langages and I could help on it if you help me the way I need help on dformat: do the QA and research to be sure the tool behave the way it do. regards, -- Marc Chantreux Pôle CESAR (Calcul et services avancés à la recherche) Université de Strasbourg 14 rue René Descartes, BP 80010, 67084 STRASBOURG CEDEX 03.68.85.60.79
