On Sunday, 26 April 2026 16:01:23 BST Morten Bo Johansen wrote:
> Hi Deri,
> 
> On 2026-04-23 Deri via discussion of the GNU roff typesetting system and 
related software wrote:
> > [..]
> > 
> > If you have time to test this s.tmac please let me know your results and
> > thoughts.
> 
> Not much to say, other than I tried it and it works for me as advertised.
> Very nice. I suppose that the large majority of users would want these
> features and consequently your version of s.tmac perhaps ought to replace
> the current official one. In that case, I think the -rPDFFEAT=1 option
> should be the default and as such it should not be necessary to give it as
> an option to the groff command line - there are enough options already. Only
> if you want to turn off the features, then -rPDFFEAT=0 would be needed.

Thank you for the report, glad it works for you. Yes, I wrote it as a 
replacement for the current s.tmac (I have full update rights to groff as a 
FSF contributor) but I wanted to gauge appetite for the change on the list 
first. My problem is typing speed! As well as the 30 lines or so of code 
changes to s.tmac, I need to add text to groff_ms.7, groff.texi, ms.ms.in and 
NEWS, a lot more than 30 lines of text, and I am not very good at documenting 
in the first place, I have never had to do it in my professional career. I was 
lucky because my employers wanted my skill at solving problems (which is 
essentially what any program does), so usually I would prototype a solution 
which would then be handed to a development team.

I set the default to -rPDFFEAT=0 to follow Branden's example of turning off 
the OSC escapes he added to the man macros for one release, and then turned it 
on.
  
> I wonder what happens to your contributions?: The ttffontinstall.pl script
> lives a completely obscure life as an attachment to a bug report and
> possibly this one will be found only if someone stumbles upon this thread in
> the mail archive. Why not put both of them in the ../contrib directory in
> the latest development version of groff? The s.tmac should then perhaps be
> renamed to "sd.tmac" or something and sourced from msd.tmac - 'd' for Deri
> ;) This would ensure them being used and tested.

ttffontinstall.pl is not quite ready for prime-time, still improving the 
makemap program which creates a custom map file to feed to afmtodit (rather 
than just feeding text.map or symbol.map). Also it needs extending to set up 
the fonts to devps as well.

There's plenty of other code still on the vine!! My busgrap preprocessor for 
doing business graphics, the pdfman programs which turns all the man documents 
on your system to a hot-linked collection of pdfs (even man pages which don't 
use the .MR, .MT/.ME, .UR/.UE macros). A web version of it is here:-

https://chuzzlewit.co.uk/WebManPDF.pl/man://postfix

But on my own system I set up an xdg-mime handler for man:// protocol which 
uses the program directly rather than a browser, I haven't had to use man or 
mandoc for 15 years.

Cheers

Deri

> Regards,
> Morten





  • ... Deri via discussion of the GNU roff typesetting system and related software
    • ... Larry McVoy
    • ... Morten Bo Johansen
      • ... Deri via discussion of the GNU roff typesetting system and related software

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