> - provides sensible float handling > - can be captioned and labelled
Wouldn't it be useful to split off that functionality into a separate float handler, to have available also for tables and pic diagrams, and provide a bare-bones PDF image includer à la PSPIC instead? > It would be exceptionally nice if groff natively handled > images in formats other than ps and pdf, but I don't think > that's going to happen any time soon. For now, it's .ps, > or .pdf, or nothing. Not a huge issue with 'convert'. True. For vector graphics, there really isn't much choice -- you have PS/PDF and SVG (and some not-so-often used formats such as HPGL and CGM and various CAD formats), so you just stick to the most common and support that. For raster graphics there's quite a large number of commonly used formats (GIF, PNG, JPEG, PBM/PGM/PPM, TIFF, BMP, ...) and it seems rather ambitious to support them all. I'd probably vote for keeping groff small and doing the conversion with specialized external programs instead. Performing conversions on-the-fly by repeatedly calling external programs while running groff strikes me as wasteful, since I'd be formatting a document quite a number of times while writing it, and I'd probably be too impatient to wait the extra few seconds...
