Re: Groff

[Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost>]

tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost writes:

> On Thu, Jun 04, 2015 at 08:05:16AM +0300, Aleksej Saushev wrote:
>> tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost writes:
>> 
>>> [pledge for TeX---not TexLive]
>> 
>> There's a lot better approach that beats all the above on all accounts.
>> 
>> Import libxml2, libxslt, w3m that are all readily available, convert man
>> pages to a human-readable and human-writable format, which is XML,
>> and stop using archaic formats.
>> 
>> This has a number of significant benefits over TeX or roff:
>> 1. XML is well-known, the syntax doesn't require anything special to learn.
>> 2. There's abundancy of software to process it.
>> 3. XML can be used immediately, without preprocessing step (just point
>> web browser at it, and it will load stylesheet and perform XSL
>> transformation for you).
>> 4. Desktop users will have really good rendering as provided by Firefox
>> or Webkit.
>
> That there may be not software but bloatware: Firefox and al. to
> succeed, more or less, to provide a rendering has nothing to appeal to
> me. That this bloat format has to be processed by tools that depend on
> gigabytes of software needing C++ compiler and al. to ---try to--- be
> compiled is definitively not what I call a "system" typesetting. Needing
> gigs of memory to try to run firefox or chrome or whatever has nothing
> to appeal to me; not to mention that the last time I gave a try to
> compile chromium it retrieved half of the Google cache as dependencies,
> took hours of compilation (on a rather decent computer) to finally fail
> to _link_ the objects because 4 gigs of memory was not enough!!!!!

I suggest that you stop talking nonsense. It negatively affects NetBSD's image.
Processing XML does not require more resources than processing runoff.
Writing full-blown XML parser is a task for a student lab (if you throw
internal DTD support off, XML grammar is only marginally more complex
than that of, say, JSON). If you don't like XSLT, writing tree walker is
definitely not a rocket science.

Besides,

$ pkg_info -S libxslt
Information for libxslt-1.1.28nb3:

Size in bytes including required pkgs: 15548744

and you can strip it down further, if you care.

Not to mention that Firefox is not the only typesetting engine out there.
Fanatics of curses-based solution can use more primitive ones.

> Furthermore, all the text tools provided by the system (and even only
> the POSIX.2 text tools) can be readily used on a TeX file.
>
> Finally, my idea would be the reverse: use the lean TeX engine

TeX is definitely more heavyweight solution than full-blown XML
processing stack.


-- 
HE CE3OH...