Hi Larry, At 2025-04-11T18:00:58-0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > On Fri, Apr 11, 2025 at 07:22:16PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > but more relevantly for this thread, there still exist systems out > > there running a troff descended from Unix System V/DWB 2.0, and I > > want to encourage their admins to replace it with GNU roff. > > I don't have a horse in this race but I've been using groff for > decades and it has never let me down. [...] Ran a bunch of old > Unix docs through it and it just worked.
I'm thrilled to hear it. Despite a couple of contentious threads over the years I really do try not to break things, but there is sometimes the fact of historically divergent implementations to grapple with; some people whose documents previously had no problems have proven to be unreceptive to adjustments made to accommodate others whose documents _did_, even if there's a knob available to fiddle the behavior. AT&T- vs. BSD-style ms(7) is a case in point. The `TM` and `CT` macros mean different things in the two implementations, and there are numerous other subtle differences. > A while back I made some changes to the -ms setup and made things > "nicer". I'm curious to know what you had to do in this area. I'd like groff ms output to look nice. :) > Hmm, there is one place that let me down, groff's pic, when you do big > thick lined boxes with rounded corners, yeah, the corners didn't match > up with the box. It's a small thing, I noticed because I have some > scripts that turn my notes into slide packs and I used those boxes as > a "container" for each slide. Do you have a reproducer for this? Or can someone else whip one up? Let's get it into a bug report. On a similar note, I haven't forgotten about Duncan Losin's polygon extension to pic,[1] and I want to give that some attention between 1.24.0.rc1 and final release. > I asked Sun's sales people if I should switch to something more > professional and they said "absolutely not, your slides look like an > engineer did them" :-) > > So 35 years ago that was a feature... Applying a lot of polish can have unintended consequences. :) The only time I've been in a witness box in court--for a routine civil matter--I handed some paperwork up to the judge, and one document gave him pause such that he started asking his clerk about an unfamiliar "new form" that seemed to be in use. After a bit of back and forth and further inquiries made of me, it turned out that I had constructed a typeset document carefully enough (following examples on the court's Web site) that the judge thought I had completed an existing document instead of creating one from scratch. I was meticulous because I wanted to get everything correct and not have to come back. It worked. That was a few years before I got involved with groff development. Regards, Branden [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2024-11/msg00163.html
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