Re: [Groff] Integer arithmetic

[Miklos Somogyi]

On 15/10/2009, at 11:50 PM, Tadziu Hoffmann wrote:

  :
  :

>   And I
> believe the work everyone contributes to this list is well
> appreciated.


This situation and attitudes towards groff is a lot more complex than  
this.
In my professional life  needed a lot of high level Math and graphics  
galore,
including 3d. I found that as far as Math was concerned, eqn did a  
good job
for me. With troff I found a great number of limitations, like integer  
arithmetic,
that stole my tine on a great scale, but otherwise did the job.

As far as graphics goes, pic may have satisfied many people but for many
others it was a lower kindergarten thing.
I tried to integrate PostScript into groff and found it rather  
difficult to do.
I pestered Werner for this and that to the level of frustration that  
the community
told me the same thing that Patrik got.

Nevertheless I spent a few weeks on this integration thing and produced
a longish report on what can be done and how, and gave an example.
Graphics, far more complex than what you can hope from pic, embedded
in groff. I haven't got a single answer, apart from the usual thing:  
this file is too big,
cut it down. Did not feel appreciated.

I was wondering what was the cause of this no answer.
Did I offend people by doing far better graphics than they used to do  
with pic?
Was my contribution worthless?
Was graphics in groff not welcome?
Was my person the problem? A relative newcomer trying too teach people
who knew much more about groff than I did?
Me, who used groff vs people who lived it?
I can't remember who told me that groff now had variable names longer
than 2 characters and a few things like that, so what else would  
anyone want?
I was compiling a list of few pages, but deleted it: what for would I  
bother?

Basically this thing comes down to the distinction between maintain and
develop. Development only occurs if someone is sufficiently pissed off
and writes something. This is not going to fix the problems.
In my concern, engineering graphics and presentation tools, groff  
would need
to be re-written from bottom up.
No one will be pissed off that much to rewrite the whole thing on the  
sides.

Another thing is hangers-on. nroff and man without graphics, etc bring  
groff
down to the level where we are now, when a nicely developed groff  
could beat
any word processor in the market. Not only those who are even worse  
than we are
but manage to be acceptable to publishers of scientific text.

The whole thing boils down to a few questions: what is the role of  
groff in the gnu
world? Why doesn't it get more attention then maintaining?
And why to maintain nroff and similar things for those few who still  
can not afford
to buy a laser printer, at the expense of the many who can?
And, at the same token, why do we restrict the size of e-mails to  
accommodate
the very few who can not get adsl at the expense of the vast majority  
op people
who can.

Best wishes,

Miklos