[TUHS] Re: Old troff files (1988-2007)

["Jacobson, Doug W [E CPE] via TUHS" <tuhs@tuhs.org>]

Hello group:

BTW:, I love all the comments and discussions this started.

Using Groff (eqn+pic) + grap I was able to create a PDF of the book.  It took about 8 hours part of which was figuring out the syntax differences. He had divided the book up into a file for each page or two, so 100+ files.  I think he did that, so he did not waste paper since he had to print out the pages to see if they looked right, no display to view them. It was not perfect but is good enough for the publisher to review.  The book is on filters (EE book) and is full of graphs, circuits, and equations.  He used pic to draw the circuits, which was amazing.  This was fun to take a forgotten manuscript written by a colleague and with luck maybe getting it published while he is still alive.  If the publisher wants to publish it, I'm not sure how they will handle troff files :) 

Doug

-----Original Message-----
From: G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> 
Sent: Tuesday, October 8, 2024 1:45 AM
To: Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org>
Cc: Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>; Jacobson, Doug W [E CPE] <dougj@iastate.edu>; tuhs@tuhs.org; groff@gnu.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Re: Old troff files (1988-2007)

Hi Leah,

At 2024-10-07T16:50:48+0200, Leah Neukirchen wrote:
> "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> writes:
> > Anton Shepelev wrote a summary I find admirably concise and blunt:
> >
> > "`grotty' is not an appendix to a pager, but a program for printing 
> > direct to the terminal.  Most terminals support those basic ANSI 
> > control sequences, and many console programs freely use them.  If a 
> > pager cannot transparently forward them to the terminal, it is a 
> > problem of the pager, not of `grotty', and having a broken -man 
> > configuration by default to just to appease `less' is stupid."
> 
> I don't see the problem, less supports -R for the last 25 years...

Yeah.  People's ire seems to rise from the fact that grotty's default is to assume SGR support and less's default is to not interpret SGR.

I would prefer that `-R` were less's default; that would better serve the larger proportion of ECMA-48 video terminals using the pager versus those using it with (an emulator of) hardcopy terminals.

Whatever transition process needs to commence for that to happen, I think it should.

But in the meantime it's no great effort for me (nor for most people) to alias 'less' to 'less -R', write a shell function to do similarly, or just type three more characters.

(For those requiring accessibility assistance, shell aliases and functions, programmable key bindings, and similar should serve as they do the merely impatient.)

Regards,
Branden