Re: groff issue after upgrade to NetBSD-9.2

[steve%prd.co.uk@localhost (Steve Blinkhorn)]

Thanks, helpful and enlightening, and I am pursuing the
Heirloom distribution.  Shame about the name, though, sounds like
'legacy' which has come to mean out-of-date.  Troff is one of those
software designs that far exceeded in its capabilities the purposes
for which it was originally designed.

But I have to dispute the matter of ordinary users not needing to
modify files.  The DESC file as distributed supposes a North American
user base, with the papersize variable set to letter.   This has a
number of minor implications for layout specification, but also
results in printers either demanding that letter-size paper be loaded,
which means at the least fiddling with printer settings to pretend
that A4 paper is really letter size paper, or in some cases the
document just not printing in my experience.

And are people generally happy with the standard PostScript fonts?  I
find them ugly and old-fashioned for the most part.  We dropped
Palatino as our standard house style once PostScript printers came
along - its version of Palatino is much uglier than the one we used
with DEC LN03 laser printers way back.

The fact that the Heirloom release has much more flexible font-file
handling is a real benefit: it was sweated labour converting our font
collection to be usable with groff (but it is a big collection).

--
Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost>

You wrote:
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> At Fri, 4 Mar 2022 17:26:23 +0000 (UTC), steve%prd.co.uk@localhost (Steve Blinkhorn) wrote:
> Subject: Re: groff issue after upgrade to NetBSD-9.2
> >
> > Unpacking the textproc set overwrites files like
> > /usr/share/groff_font/devps/DESC and devps/download, and maybe other
> > files which have been adapted or expanded locally.  The unpacking
> > process follows any symbolic link that devps has been set to rather
> > than overwriting the symbolic link with a hard directory.  Fortunately
> > I have backups.   Would this not be worth a warning in the installation
> > guide - it's a similar issue  to /etc, where precious lolcalisations
> > risk being lost?
> 
> Yeah, I would say most of those are not normally files that any end user
> would be expected to localise.
> 
> I think the best you can hope for is, perhaps, in a future upgrade
> if/when syspkgs are used, that there may someday be some conflict
> detection for locally modified system files.
> 
> That said, you could also add any system files you've customised to
> /etc/mtree/special.local and they'll be backed up, with complete daily
> automatic version control, into /var/backups by /etc/security.  See
> "check_changelist" in security.conf(5).
> 
> 
> > I know thered is a move not to includee groff etc. in the main
> > distribution, but some of us use it extensively: I have substantial
> > software systems which emit *roff source files, it's not just a
> > manpage generator.
> 
> Perhaps you would be a lot happier with a more modern troff?
> 
> I would suggest trying out pkgsrc/textproc/heirloom-doctools
> 
> Despite the name, these are quite modernised versions of the original
> true AT&T Troff and related tools from what was effectively the
> Documenter's Workbench.  These tools even have a special "groff"
> compatability mode if indeed you depend on any Groff extensions.
> 
> See https://n-t-roff.github.io/heirloom/doctools.html
> 
> (There is also a port of old DWB-3 (3.3b) in pkgsrc/textproc/DWB, but it
> has not been modernised nearly so much.)
> 
> One potentially huge advantage of using doctools over the base-system
> groff would be that you can much more easily customise (and test!) the
> tools and their configuration by applying local patches via pkgsrc.
> 
> That said I've long argued for these heirloom-doctools to be used to
> replace the base system Groff, and I would still strongly suggest that
> be done.
> 
> --
> 					Greg A. Woods <gwoods%acm.org@localhost>
> 
> Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods%robohack.ca@localhost>
> Planix, Inc. <woods%planix.com@localhost>     Avoncote Farms <woods%avoncote.ca@localhost>
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