Re: Re: Heirloom Troff for NetBSD (was: Removing ARCNET stuffs)

[tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost]

On Tue, Jun 09, 2015 at 06:04:52PM +0000, David Holland wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 09, 2015 at 04:51:09PM +0200, carsten.kunze%arcor.de@localhost wrote:
>  > "James K. Lowden" <jklowden%schemamania.org@localhost> wrote:
>  > 
>  > > I didn't know Heirloom Troff produces PDFs directly, a feature I think
>  > > is very valuable.  In that case, is there any reason not to substitute
>  > > it for groff, apart from some engineering work and possibly some
>  > > touch-up to a few documents?  
>  > 
>  > It does product PDF directly, if you pipe the output of dpost(1) to
>  > e.g. "ps2pdf - <PDF filename>" :-)
>  > 
>  > But it can put additional information for the PDF generation into
>  > the PS document with the pdfmark operator.  This way
>  > e.g. hyperlinks and also bookmarks can be included (the table of
>  > contents that PDF viewers show on the left side).  So the result
>  > has the features which had been addressed in this thread.  I
>  > usually don't generate a PS document (but use the pipe to ps2pdf)
>  > because of the size of PS files.
>  > 
>  > Drawback is that ghostscript has a GNU license.
> 
> Importing ghostscript into base to get ps2pdf is not an option. (And
> if it were, by far the path of least resistance would be to do that
> and keep the current groff.)

This is why I argue that the TeX system (stripped to the minimum) can be
used to obtain a totally auto-sufficient formatting system, including
display of complex documents, since TeX is a formatter and since
METAFONT is a rasterizer, and everything comes with the fonts.

Generating PostScript is kind of cheating, since one has now to
interpret PostScript (and to have the obligation to develop another not
GPL PostScript interpreter is not really appealing). PDF is slightly 
better because more limited (if limited to basic features; but it has
grown to interactive device so there will always be people arguing for
using special features not there) but the need to have a PDF viewer is 
still here.

TeX is the basis for a _system_ formatting system because it is almost
self-sufficient. At least if the needle is put out of the haystack.
And this is what I have done with kerTeX.

-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                     http://www.arts-po.fr/
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