Last year I used JavaScript and Web technologies to create an interactive, high-quality rendition of gropdf's output. I implemented this as a postprocessor with hand-written transition tables which all a single-pass through the raw DITROFF output (the "intermediate representation") For Deri Jane's gropdf macros, a few additional passes were needed to identify PDFMark features (mainly bookmarked headings and clickable "hotspots").. I'm digressing now, I won't bore you guys with the details.
Point is, my project was *right* in the throes of completion, before my poor old MacBook died. So I've moved to OpenBSD 6.1 <https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2346707/34102859-c21b026e-e43e-11e7-886b-afc8db1cbab2.jpg> as was planned for ages. I love OpenBSD, although it wasn't kind to my attempts to build *Atom* <https://atom.io/> or *Electron* <https://electronjs.org/>, or even an up-to-date build of *Node 9.3.0* <https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/10904>. Somebody on OpenBSD's ports team will need to create ports for them I guess. Emacs is keeping me company for the time being, at least. :) Those interested in my work can dig through everything at https://github.com/Alhadis/Roff.js (libraries for marrying the worlds of modern web technologies to a 40+-year old typesetting system). The finished material will be used to implement live-updating previews of Roff as you're working on it, via the language package <https://github.com/Alhadis/language-roff> I originally wrote. Since these are pure, standardised web technologies well-supported by modern browsers, it'd be trivial to refactor my work so one can view graphically typeset output as they work. The biggest hurdle is making Groff (or any other *full *Troff implementation) available to pipe the preprocessed and processed page elements to the JS-based postprocessor. Which is why porting Groff's codebase to JavaScript is making it seem more and more like such a great idea... On 10 Jan 2018 1:26 am, "Larry Kollar" <kol...@windstream.net> wrote: > John Gardner <gardnerjo...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I'm wondering how many people here might react if I suggested porting the > entire Geoff codebase to JavaScript… LOL go for it! I often joked that nothing useful was ever written in Javascript. That hasn’t been true for a while, but it would be cool to see how you handle the command-line options, pre- and post-processors, and so on. Larry
