[9fans] Heirloom Doctools: Just Curious

[9fans] Heirloom Doctools: Just Curious

[Gregory Pavelcak]

Someone posted a notice about the latest heirloom doctools troff
release not long ago, so I took a look at it.  In general, by my
lights anyway, it tweaks troff in positive ways.  I since downloaded
the sources and made some efforts to build it with ape tools but have
gotten almost nowhere, which is almost no surprise since I have almost
no clue.

Has anyone else tried to build this on Plan 9?  Just wondering if
anyone's had any good results with this.

Thanks.

Greg

Re: [9fans] Heirloom Doctools: Just Curious

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> Has anyone else tried to build this on Plan 9?  Just wondering if
> anyone's had any good results with this.

I'd rather apply the changes to our own troff source base.  Licensing will 
decide if that's even practical.

I've pulled the source down, and a quick look shows that they've based at 
least part of their code base on the Plan 9 source, but there are also 
large swaths of Solaris source.  What needs to be done is to diff their 
code against the original distributions they started with, and then see 
how practical it will be to apply those changes to the Plan9 source.

In particular, I would really like to see native support for Opentype, and 
was planning to do that work myself anyway, so I have some incentive to 
look into this.  Let me poke around in their CVS repository and see if I 
can get a reasonable set of diffs to work with.

--lyndon

Re: [9fans] Heirloom Doctools: Just Curious

[Gregory Pavelcak]

I'm glad to see some interest.  I'm not a programmer, but, as you
consider the plausibility of the project, please keep in mind that I'd
be willing to help where I can.

Greg


>> Has anyone else tried to build this on Plan 9?  Just wondering if
>> anyone's had any good results with this.
> 
> I'd rather apply the changes to our own troff source base.  Licensing will 
> decide if that's even practical.
> 
> I've pulled the source down, and a quick look shows that they've based at 
> least part of their code base on the Plan 9 source, but there are also 
> large swaths of Solaris source.  What needs to be done is to diff their 
> code against the original distributions they started with, and then see 
> how practical it will be to apply those changes to the Plan9 source.
> 
> In particular, I would really like to see native support for Opentype, and 
> was planning to do that work myself anyway, so I have some incentive to 
> look into this.  Let me poke around in their CVS repository and see if I 
> can get a reasonable set of diffs to work with.
> 
> --lyndon

Re: [9fans] Heirloom Doctools: Just Curious

[Joel Salomon]

> I've pulled the source down, and a quick look shows that they've based at 
> least part of their code base on the Plan 9 source,

More likely it’s based on the same UNIX source that Plan 9’s is (ditroff by way of OpenSolaris; ours is by way of Research Unix)

It would be nice to merge the code bases; the Heirloom troff has some nice features (judging from the web page and demonstration files).

--Joel