Hi Branden,
> I think this is due to its Perl dependency more than any antipathy toward > PDF. That's still a valid reason to avoid fiddling with defaults needlessly, IMHO. You mean with a text editor? Conceded. Partially. I think [PDF] is in a > compressed form by default, but you can turn that off and get more > human-readable output. As somebody neurotic enough to write PDFs in plain-text <https://github.com/Alhadis/Raw-PDF/blob/master/font.pdf?short_path=5262fab>, I can tell you that PDF's uncompressed syntax isβ¦ actually quite straightforward. Verbose and extremely fiddly, yes, but designed to be understood by PostScript programmers. This form isn't very space efficient for anything but very simple documents (like those <https://github.com/Alhadis/Raw-PDF> I wrote for practice, or ones written for pedagogy). Ergo, PDF object streams support various compression methods (like Flate and LZW) atop any other compression or encryption filters in effect (which can further obfuscate the contents of, say, a protected PDF). Regards, β <~8oJB\~> On Tue, 25 Mar 2025 at 06:59, G. Branden Robinson < g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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. > > π 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 >
