Re: Summary of man-page formatting

[tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost]

On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 07:50:02AM +0000, David Holland wrote:
> [...]
> 
> (2) Thierry mentions kertex as an alternative to trying to import
> ordinary tex into base (which is a nonstarter), but this never goes
> anywhere;

To put clearly things about the proposal:

1) I do not propose to import TeX (via kerTeX) in base _now_ because IMO
the base is already sufficiently fat to not import something that has no
usage with the system documentation. As long as a TeX system can not
handle the current system documentation, it has nothing to do in base
and is available as an optional software;

2) I know sufficiently well the TeX system to claim that a limited
amount of work could provide, without any strings attached (license or
dependency), the processing of a system documentation, man pages or doc,
with at least the same result as the one obtained at present (they are
only text documentation, and this can be done relatively easily);

3) I do claim that it could, with more work, do _more_ than what is
provided today, because it could offer custom fonts for console; it
could offer man pages or doc with more than text (all in all, texinfo
was an incorrect solution to a good idea, allowing links in the doc for
example); and _then_, all this will be done with less than the present
size of *roff in base providing too, a complete
typographical/documentation system in the base system.

I hence beg to differ from your conclusion: there is one solution,
and only one, at the present state and this is to add some work to
TeX. This is why I would like the *BSD to consider giving it a try,
for example via GSoC.

As I have already written, if I live long enough, it will be eventually
done by me. But I have already too many things to do---not to mention
that even if I don't use LaTeX, I have to support LaTeX because, while
TeX is the more thouroughly documented system, with a limited number of
pages (D. E. K.'s series), LaTeX, whose documentation is lengthy than
TeX'..., had the result that its users generally never learned anything
about TeX and don't understand it... So to speed things, additionnal
help would be needed and in this case I will, of course, help in 
providing advices and tell where, IMO, to start and how to find one's 
way in the code.

That's the proposal.

Best,
-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                    http://kertex.kergis.com/
                       http://www.sbfa.fr/
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