Re: [Groff] Mission statement

[Dave Kemper]

On 3/15/14, Pierre-Jean <address@hidden> wrote:
>>  . Implement TeX's paragraph formatting or something similar - I
>>    consider groff's line-oriented paragraph formatting as its weakest
>>    point.  See heirloom troff for an example how this could be
>>    implemented.
>>
>>      http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html
>>
>>  . Update to today's font world.  What groff currently supports
>>    natively (PostScript Type 1) is out of date since 15 years.
>>    Again, heirloom troff has support for this.
>>
>>  . Apply zillions of small bug fixes sent to the groff mailing list.
>>
>>  . Better support of Unicode.
>
> With that in mind, the recent mission statement is a bit
> disapointing concerning the text processing mission of
> groff:

+1

> And why not mentionning heirloom implementation ? Isn't it
> an important reference for anyone wishing to work on these
> features ?

I'd go further than this.  Given that Heirloom troff has many useful
typesetting features that groff currently lacks, and given that increased
interoperability can only be a good thing, I'd propose that groff adopt
the goal of implementing most or all requests that Heirloom has added.
It would be a great thing if groff could handle any document designed
for any past or present *roff system; Heirloom's added features seem to
be the primary shortcoming in this regard.