Miklos Somogyi wrote:
Ditto. Environment variables too. Everything valid to the shell,
should be valid to groff.
Why? User convenience. Shouldn't this be consideration No 1?
Slight problems: which shell, what OS?
That's exactly the point. I can't believe I'm the first to mention
this as a problem in 35 years of *roff's existence. But with groff
being cross-platform, ~ might not mean anything to a W32 user. I
think using \V[HOME] to pull the home directory from the environment
is reasonably portable.
I would rather pay for a thoroughly modern implementation of troff
that only inherits
the wonderful original ideas but not the constraints of the
original times.
Well, groff eliminated what I would consider the biggest constraint
of the original: the two-character namespace. The second biggest is
Unicode support, and that has both a current workaround and a real
fix in CVS. Other things like TOC, Index, cross-references, and
bitmap graphic support are supported through long-established
workflows, without excess baggage where such things aren't needed.
What do you see as major constraints with groff at this time?
--
Larry Kollar k o l l a r @ a l l t e l . n e t
Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival"
http://unixtext.org/
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