Am Mon, 17 Mar 2014 17:44:21 -0400 schrieb Peter Schaffter <pe...@schaffter.ca>:
> Here's the second draft of the mission statement, incorporating > suggestions from Ingo, Eric, Pierre-Jean, and others. It's starting > to come into focus, although a third pass will probably be necessary > before we commit to it. Up to now I could not contribute to this discussion, because I am a mere user. I'm using groff (mostly modified ms macros) and am following this group for many years by now. You see me rarely in this group because I am fully satisfied and found a solution to every typesetting problem, *but* ONE. Still groffing. [...] > GROFF MISSION STATEMENT, 2014, 2nd draft [...] > Future groff development will focus on these areas: [...] > Backend > > The biggest challenge facing groff is the implementation of > paragraph-at-once formatting based on the Knuth-Plass algorithm. > Already present in Heirloom troff, this is a high-priority next step > in groff's evolution, along with the addition of typesetting > features modelled after Heirloom troff. [...] > Equally important for groff's future will be instituting native > support for TrueType, OpenType, and other non-Type1 (PostScript) > fonts, as well as improving Unicode support. Here is my problem. I have to (i.e. "want to") typeset chinese texts. With the invaluable help from Werner Lemberg I could transform a TeX chinese font into a groff font format - but as no paragraph management for this font is available, I had to switch to LaTeX and XeTeX. If TrueType etc. fonts had a native support and paragraph management of paragraphs in CJK fonts were possible, all my problems were solved. I got the impression that at least for advanced users groff and TeX are more or less equal. A good friend of mine uses plain TeX and LaTeX because he has to use Lilypond, and I can understand his position that he just wants to use 1 typesetting environment. Apart from these and other special issues the difference may be a question of taste. Mine is with the elegance of the groff markup, but, really, I don't see sense in "groff-versus-TeX-wars". In this group is a very high level of expertise. As a mere user who wants "that it just works", from a practical point of view, I am preferring groff wherever possible. Not because the TeX family is bad. OK I could totally forget the whole WYSIWYG clan, and deeply regret every time I have to use that stuff at work. For that purpose, it could be a nice idea if groff could support rtf, otf, epub output. (And a vice-versa-conversion.) But it will always be beyond my means to write a thing like that. But perhaps you'll like to see that even a completely non-programmer like me still is using groff. > Finally, it is hoped that users of and contributors to groff will > promote its use, providing unobtrusive advocacy to encourage more > widespread adoption of the program, thereby increasing the pool of > potential contributors and developers. This I'd like to do wherever I can, but the people I know live in the windows world. WORD...WYSIWYG...nice colored buttons...light, joyful and fine beginning, and eventually nothing but anger and desperation... The other day, I worked with a colleage and showed her the advantages of a plain text editor driven typesetting system. Like groff, TeX, plain text for emails, or lout for that matter. She was amazed how efficient, simple, nonobtrusive such a system can be, because of the (this discussion mentioned that several times) Unix philosophy of chaining simple tools together. A good text editor and an efficient typesetting program instead of "do everything in one place". Alas poor Yorick. At work, she *has* to use Word. You realize the level on which I'm thinking. Wherever I can, I spare time, work, and nerves using things like groff. So I'd be glad if that will live on. Again, the support of epub, rtf, otf would be *very* nice, but, I fear, support of Unicode, TrueTypefonts and the corresponding paragraph management, might be mandatory. Cheers, and thanks for the many informative posts in this group, Erich
