Hi Ralph, Or at best, gives it through some clunky ‘treat it as a string’ mechanism. >
How is that clunky? Text is text. It's opaque, honest, and universal. The foundation of the Unix Philosophy… you know this as well as I do. ;-) One could look at shoehorning evermore complexity through to the > post-processor, but that denies integration with the rest of troff of the > expressiveness of those features. > I have a (currently hypothetical and unimplemented) solution that might resolve the issue of integration and expressiveness. I've posted about it before in this list <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2020-09/msg00031.html> and won't subject folks to another long-winded diatribe. ;-) But the premise is that this: .UR https://example.com/ Hyperlink example .UE . gets preprocessed into something this: \X'meta: begin link'\c .UR \X'meta: begin href'https://example.com/\X'meta: end href' Hyperlink example .UE . \X'meta: end link' … that's then used to demarcate regions of semantic or structural value for a postprocessor that enhances the groff_out(5) source in some driver-specific fashion. I'm cognisant of the challenges this would involve, and I'm not even claiming it's doable at this stage, but I'd still like to have a crack at it nonetheless. 👍 It'll be fun when I get around to it. — John On Wed, 25 May 2022 at 21:43, Ralph Corderoy <ra...@inputplus.co.uk> wrote: > Hi John, > > > > Support of modern font technologies and of course languages which > > > aren't left-to-right. > > > > Agreed. But for everything else you've mentioned: it's just a matter > > of writing another PDF postprocessor (or some other adapter for a > > particular format). Postprocessors are where the real beauty of > > Troff's staying power shines. > > One could look at shoehorning evermore complexity through to the > post-processor, but that denies integration with the rest of troff of > the expressiveness of those features. Or at best, gives it through some > clunky ‘treat it as a string’ mechanism. Think more of a language were > expressions can have these as first-class things with powerful > operators. > > > > but the modern graphics model of PDF has moved on a lot from theirs > > > and isn't targeted. Images and SVG as first-class objects. > > > Transformation matrices. Advanced colour handling. Text-flow > > > layout. > > > > PDF's graphics model hasn't changed > > From memory, PDF 1.3 added transitioning between colours, PDF 1.4 > introduced transparency, and PDF 1.7 gave us 3D artwork. There must be > many more incremental improvements. :-) > > > and SVG isn't a first class object in PDF documents. > > No, I know. I was meaning they would be in a new document-layout > language. > > -- > Cheers, Ralph. > >
