Hi Doug, Damian, and Jon, At 2025-03-24T11:33:53-0400, Douglas McIlroy wrote: > I have qualms about changing the default output device.
So do I! I have no plans to do it for the next release, no desire to do it before we have solid PDF support in groff's ms(7), me(7), and mm(7), and by the time all of that lands, it'd be a good idea to take the community's temperature again. > It would break a lot of makefiles. Conceded, but Makefiles should already be using an explicit `-T` argument or using GROFF_TYPESETTER. Maybe, in the groff release _before_ any planned change to the default, we should make groff start warning if neither is the case. Just a thought. > Some distributors of groff exclude gropdf. I think this is due to its Perl dependency more than any antipathy toward PDF. > One can't read or edit PDF. (I do both.) You mean with a text editor? Conceded. Partially. I think it's in a compressed form by default, but you can turn that off and get more human-readable output. A quick experiment: $ echo 'Hello, world.' | groff -T pdf -P -d reveals a PostScript-like language, with unfortunate occasional recourse to non-printable characters. > PDFPIC is a horror. 😅 I tried to make it less horrific for 1.24. Deri's made it more powerful, as well. > I agree that current custom favors PDF. > So I'd welcome palliative advice about my worries. No such contemplated change will happen soon. Maybe not ever. At 2025-03-25T02:40:58+1100, Damian McGuckin wrote: > On Mon, 24 Mar 2025, Douglas McIlroy wrote: > > > I have qualms about changing the default output device. > > I concur. For all of Doug's reasons. Acknowledged. At 2025-03-25T04:04:30+1100, John Gardner wrote: > > I have qualms about changing the default output device. > > Isn't this what the GROFF_TYPESETTER environment variable is for, > though? So that users can override defaults they deem to be > unintuitive? > > Changing defaults shouldn't be done willy-nilly, IMHO. I'm used to > expecting PostScript output by default from troff(1) implementations. > I'd assume many other folks are too. Dave or I will get references to this feedback into the relevant ticket, Savannah #66811. Regards, Branden
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