On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 04:16:49PM +0100, Reinoud Zandijk wrote: > > > Right, and in my experience it would be completely unsuitable. :) > > > > > > Now, don't get me wrong, I love Lout and and when I need a batch > > > formatter it's what I use unless there are strong overriding reasons. > > > But it's *way* slower than roff or tex (remember, that troff and tex > > > are macro processors, while lout uses a functional language). > > > > If speed is the primary problem it's probably fixable... > > Yeah, who uses rendering a manpage in a tight loop ;) If it runs on > the older machines in a few seconds I don't think its going to be > an issue. And it isn't that slow is it?
Again, it's not about man pages. We have mandoc, it works; this thread arose from a discussion of formatting man pages for not-80-columns, which is a different issue entirely. The thing we want a new/different solution for is formatting release notes and miscellaneous documents (and the mostly-nonexistent NetBSD docshelf, which would be nice to have in a viable state) -- for this speed is, though not irrelevant, not a primary concern as it'll be happening on fast build machines in parallel with compilation. What I meant though was: if the problem is that lout has a functional language interpreter in it and that interpreter is slow, it can probably be made faster. However, I took a quick look at the source yesterday and it seems the code comes as 52 source files numbered 01-52, which is not, shall we say, entirely auspicious. :-| -- David A. Holland dholl...@netbsd.org
