> > That groff cannot do the first at all, and requires external helpers > (one of them not even shipped with the package) for the latter two, > ironically makes it look more outdated than its "heirloom" counterpart.
What I find laughable as that neither of them support right-to-left languages, which is a pretty embarrassing shortcoming for typesetting software to have. Neatroff comes to the rescue on that front, so... we're basically looking at unifying *three* major implementations. ;-) Or, you know, we could not unify anything and simply document their differences instead. On Sun, 26 Jul 2020 at 22:24, Dave Kemper <saint.s...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > By the way, is it a goal of groff to support the Heirloom Troff > extensions? > > > > Nope, more like the other way around. Groff is the dominant Troff > > implementation these days, so it behoves Heirloom Troff to support the > more > > commonly-used extensions. > > It's not a question of which implementation has the bigger market > share, but which has the richer feature set. Currently each of them > can do things the other can't. > > There's no general goal of implementing all Heirloom features that > groff is missing, but I too would like to see this happen (and vice > versa on the Heirloom side). It would greatly benefit portability and > interoperability if we could regard useful extensions as part of the > modern roff language, rather than as groff- or Heirloom-specific > features. (There would still need to be a macro package to spackle > over differences in features common to both packages but accessed with > different syntax, e.g., .tkf vs .track.) > > Anyone interested in groff's long-term goals should check out its > mission statement > (http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/groff-mission-statement.html), > crafted after much discussion on this list several years ago. Three > core improvements it mentions for groff -- using a paragraph-at-once > formatting algorithm, and natively understanding modern fonts and > character encodings -- are already in Heirloom. That groff cannot do > the first at all, and requires external helpers (one of them not even > shipped with the package) for the latter two, ironically makes it look > more outdated than its "heirloom" counterpart. > >
