Hi Luis, On 27/04/2025 08:26, Luis Rivera wrote: > Il giorno mer 16 apr 2025 alle ore 05:41 Keith Marshall > <keith.d.marsh...@ntlworld.com> ha scritto: >> I don't yet know where pdfroff/pdfmark may be hosted; FSF Savannah is a >> likely candidate. Wherever it does end up, it will be hosted as an hg >> repository, since git's user interface is much too repulsive for me to >> waste my time trying to learn it. > > I have seen, indeed, somewhat of a placeholder on the savannah domain, > but no releases as of today.
Well, it's barely two weeks since I was granted approval for hosting on Savannah. I pushed the Mercurial repository content soon after, (and this is now the only up-to-date public copy of this repository), but I didn't see any value in posting old releases for download, since I was already in the process of preparing a 25.04 release; you should be able to see that now: https://savannah.nongnu.org/files/?group=groff-pdfmark > Well, the idea is that I started using pdfroff as the backend pdf > engine for John MacFarlane's Pandoc, instead of the default pdflatex > engine due to its size and complexity; ... Interesting. > ... groff, on the other hand, for a > similar looking output, was far more lean and clean. Agreed. I found groff when I was needed to migrate a bespoke process control software documentation system, which had originally been based on WordStar, to something more modern, (in the mid-1990s), and I found the contemporary crop of available MS-Windows word processing tools to be utterly unsuited to the task. Since WordStar itself seemed to have been (loosely) modelled on AT&T troff, I found groff to be an excellent fit. > However, as I am > forced to use Windows as the operating system at work, ... I too was forced to use that user-hostile operating system at work; it has been a relief to dispense with it entirely, since my retirement some eleven years ago. > ... and even though > I run a cygwin environment to manage my Posix programs, ... I used the MinGW/MSYS environment myself, having found Cygwin to be a bit slow, and clunky ... > ... I still > stumbled at the problem of somewhat of a "hybrid" environment, partly > Windows (binary executables), partly posixly (bash scripts); since > pdfroff is a bash script, I had to patch it to make it run with > different groff ports to make it compatible with the Windows port of > Pandoc, and I did not want to miss updates of the macros or the script > to stay in tune. I'm curious. IIRC, my "posix-bin" release is the correct choice for use of pdfroff with Cygwin, while the "win32-bin" release is for MinGW/MSYS. What did you need to patch? > Without a reliable implementation of pdfroff, I fear the next step > would be to move to groff -Tpdf as the engine of choice. I have > already contributed some work on Pandoc to make this transition. It > would be a pity to end support for pdfroff if some updates are > available. The release formerly bundled with groff has been obsolescent since about 2017, and has become increasingly obsolete since then. Updates have been available on OSDN.net, until the 24.10 release, after which OSDN's gradual decline, since 2019, has led to its ultimate demise. From now onwards, I will be posting future updates on Savannah, starting with the 25.04 release. I hope you will find that this meets your requirements. > Thanks for your attention. You're welcome. -- Regards, Keith.
