[9fans] TeX/roff compatibility: first feature added

[9fans] TeX/roff compatibility: first feature added

[tlaronde]

I have just released a new version of kerTeX, with Prote (the
derivative of TeX doing all: TeX, e-TeX and able to provide the
primitives for LaTeX) having a new primite: \roffdot, allowing to
treat a leading dot in a new line as an escape command (thus
interpreting what follows as a macro).

This should suffice in fact to write TeX macros to absorb text roff
scripts (man, mdoc) and do the rendering with TeX.

The aim, finally, is to get rid of PostScript (in fact unneeded, but
requiring a PostScript interpreter hence the GhostScript problem), in
a first step by converting DVI to PDF, and finally by using the
METAFONT rasterizing capabilities to generate an array of dots (an
image), leading to a small, self-contained, correct and unencumbered
layout engine doing everything, from system documentation to whatever
the user may want to produce as a (mainly text) document.

I have updated partly the IWP9 article to interpolate things I added
during the meeting.  You can find the PDF here:

http://downloads.kergis.com/kertex/doc/iwp9.pdf

-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ kergis +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                    http://kertex.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C

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Re: [9fans] TeX/roff compatibility: first feature added

[baux]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2025 at 07:04:44PM +0100, tlaronde@kergis.com wrote:
> I have just released a new version of kerTeX, with Prote (the
> derivative of TeX doing all: TeX, e-TeX and able to provide the
> primitives for LaTeX) having a new primite: \roffdot, allowing to
> treat a leading dot in a new line as an escape command (thus
> interpreting what follows as a macro).

great work!

-- 
Maurizio Boriani 

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