Re: Summary of man-page formatting

[tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost]

On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 03:10:08AM +0100, Kamil Rytarowski wrote:
> 12. I recall recurring discussions about phasing out gplv2 groff from
> the base and introduction of something else.
> 
> I can see the following options:
> 
>  - do nothing, keep shipping gnu gplv2 groff
>  - upgrade to gplv3 groff
>  - defer general purpose formatting to software from pkgsrc
>  - switch to https://github.com/aligrudi/neatroff
>  - switch to https://n-t-roff.github.io/heirloom/doctools.html
>  - switch to something else (anything else?)

I had already mentionned this occasionnally, but TeX and al, with the
BSD like licensed kerTeX distribution could be a general formatting
system, depending only on libc and being extremely small while providing
more that *roff.

It not simply provides formatting but font creation and
particularily one can combine fonts (virtual fonts) allowing to create
fonts with accented letters etc, non latin alphabets (including greek
and cyrillic) and even japanese when reusing Hershey fonts, this to have
various fonts for console.

It provides too math writing, tables and figures with MetaPost.

The aim in the (not near) future is to have MetaPost replaced with a
MetaDVI and DVI extended with graphics functions using METAFONT routines
as the rasterizing routines, providing then a totally self-content system
from font design to raster rendering (allowing too display of not only
character pages but pages with graphics in the framebuffer).

KerTeX is my creation but I can only work from time to time on it. So I
mention this because additionnal work (Google SoC or whatever) would be
needed to achieve totally this, even if intermediate state---simply
using actual state to be able to render pages for man---could be reached
with a relatively small effort.

Just to register the possibility for the future.
-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                    http://kertex.kergis.com/
                       http://www.sbfa.fr/
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