Re: Generating pdf in base

["J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost>]

On 7/5/14, 3:08 PM, David Holland wrote:
> The third set of possibilities is to do something completely
> different. This is bound to trigger a bikeshed about markup formats,
> so it's important to realize that the markup format is not the issue.
> Any adequately expressive semantic markup format will serve, and
> almost all the possible options are less noxious to edit than legacy
> roff. The issue is typesetting; typesetting is hard, and the more
> general the typesetting the harder it is. In order to do something
> completely different the first question that has to be answered is:
> what typesetting engine are we going to use, and can we import it into
> base without going crazy?

Hi, David.

I like Halibut:

  http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/halibut/

The source tarball is 919K, it's written in portable ANSI C (apart from
requiring at least a 32-bit platform), it has no dependencies, and the
license is MIT.  I would bet you could definitely import it into base
without going crazy.  (BTW, it's in Pkgsrc at textproc/halibut.)

It can directly generate plain ASCII text, HTML, PDF, PostScript, Unix
man pages (i.e. nroff input to work with the -mandoc macro package), and
Unix info.

Lewis