Hi Groffers,
Realizing that this editor is probably not the most widely used
out there (it should be), this is merely a one-off posting to
announce a groff editing mode for it - just in case one or two
Jed users were indeed lurking the shadows! The mode sports the
following features:
- Syntax highligting. The scheme is similar to Emacs' nroff
mode.
- Auto detection of the groff command needed to convert the
document. This is similar to what the grog(1) program does.
All six major macro packages, ms, me, mom, mm, man, mdoc
and the preprocessors are supported.
- Previewing of the document with a chosen output device -
which defaults to "pdf". The pdf conversion is then done with
gropdf. The user definable pdf viewer is started as a
subprocess of Jed which means that you may have the editor
with the source file occupy e.g. the left half of the desktop
and the pdf viewer the right half and then you may update the
display in the pdf viewer with a key press () from within
Jed with no need to restart the pdf viewer or even to save
the source file in between. This, I think, is particularly
handy if you're experimenting with some stuff or is in the
process of learning groff. The groff conversion command will
be auto-detected.
- Previewing support for output devices, "ps", "pdf", "ascii",
"latin1", "utf8", "html", "xhtml"
- User definable default settings for output device,
pdf-viewer, paper format, paper orientation, input encoding
and also for the groff command to convert the document - the
latter will override the auto detection mechanism in that
case.
- Quick menu to change the above settings on the fly.
- Easy installation of *.otf and *.ttf fonts. The value of
the environment variable GROFF_FONT_PATH is used as
installation target. It will be set by the mode if it is
not set in the environment.
- Batch installation of whole directories of otf/ttf fonts with
no user interaction required. The groff font family and style
(R|I|B|BI) are parsed from the font file name and the groff
font name is constructed accordingly. To install the ~280
fonts in my /usr/share/fonts/TTF/ directory took about 2
minutes.
- Pop-up completion menu with all installed groff fonts to
insert a font name.
- Pop-up completion menu with all defined groff color names to
insert a color name whenever a function requires it.
- If mandoc(1) is installed, it will be used to convert manual
page source files. Otherwise -man or -mdoc whichever is
detected.
- Menu guided drawing of some objects (lines, circles, etc)
with basic nroff/troff.
- Menu guided drawing of some objects with gpic.
- Menu to toggle inline text attributes (font face, font style,
color)
- Skip forwards or backwards to regular text parts of the
document source.
- Menu with access to all of the above with -> Mode
- With the "tabcomplete.sl" extension, also to be had from my
repository, an extensive help system is available. It is
described in its own README file and also in the README
file for the groff editing mode.
To download it, it is easiest to clone my repository at Github
git clone https://github.com/mortenivar/Jed-modes.git
It is only a few kilobytes.
If you happen to check it out, even with no intention of using
it, and anything comes to mind in the vein of suggestions or
corrections, I'll be glad to hear from you!
Thanks,
Morten
