On Tuesday, 28 July 2026 2 0:26:30 British Summer Time G. Branden Robinson wrote:
Hi Branden, > The foregoing is an interesting case. We don't actually need preconv, > eqn, _or_ pic to generate "automake.pdf". > > "automake.mom"'s only non-ASCII character appears in a _roff_ comment. > > https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/doc/automake.mom?h=1.2 > 5.0.rc1#n3 > > It uses no preprocessor tokens, either (`TS`, `EQ`, `PS`, `[`). > > Yet pdfmom(1), in an effort to be helpful I suppose, brings the full > power of its battle station to bear on poor old Alderaan. "This is not the script you are looking for". The "redundant" preconv and -p -e -t flags were added to contrib/mom/mom.am by you in commit a5af2f4d0f0. Pdfmom is innocent. diff --git a/contrib/mom/mom.am b/contrib/mom/mom.am --- a/contrib/mom/mom.am +++ b/contrib/mom/mom.am @@ -30,1 +28,1 @@ - $(PDFMOMBIN) $(FFLAG) $(TFLAG) $(MOM_TFLAG) $(MOM_KFLAG) + $(PDFMOMBIN) $(FFLAG) $(MFLAG) -M$(mom_srcdir) -k -p -e -t Using groff with both mom and ms (with PDFFEAT turned on) will warn you if multiple passes (i.e. pdfmom [--roff]) are required. Human nature will tend to always use pdfmom once the message has been seen. > 3. pdfmom(1)'s mission needs to be put on a diet.[ibid.] It seems to > have mutated into a tool with no charter except to get documents > built with brute force, multi-pass processing whether they need that > or not, throwing several preprocessors at them whether needed or > not, and, recently, sprawling beyond its initial goal of easing > production of PDF documents using the mom(7) macro package to > generating general "roff" documents, not necessarily using mom(7) > (see its `--roff`(!) option) or being produced in PDF format. Well, this is completely wrong! The ONLY purpose of pdfmom has always been to satisfy forward references (the same as pdfroff used to do for postscript but avoiding dependency on ghostscript) nothing else - no flags added, except -mom if the script is called as pdfmom and -ms if it is called as pdfms. It is you who added the unnecessary flags to the makefile not pdfmom herself (I think you owe her an apology). > In other words, having disposed of one Perl script called > groffer(1) in groff 1.23.0, we are metamorphosing another Perl > script into its replacement. Rubbish, pdfmom does none of the things you claim. > Enough! > > I have some notions of a new approach but they'll need to cook a > while longer. I have no concrete timeline for working this out. I shall look forward to hearing your ideas, but I hope you actually look at the code in pdfmom before hallucinating what you think it does. I'm afraid the force was not strong in you when you wrote your post. Cheers Deri
