GSoC: BSD text tools

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Monday, 24 May 2010 at 22:43:37 +0300, Kostik Belousov wrote:
> On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 09:17:01PM +0200, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
>> On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 12:13:07PM -0700, Charlie Kester wrote:
>>> I welcome this change, but groff is used for much more than manpages.
>>> What happens to pic, tbl, and the other troff-related "little
>>> languages"?  How can you say mdocml is "completely replacing" groff if
>>> it doesn't support those kinds of things?
>>
>> tbl(1) is going to be supported fully at some point in the future.
>> It is work-in-progress. I am not sure if pic(1) is actually used beyond
>> the groff documentation, at least I don't remember anything in NetBSD
>> where I checked. Similiar usage is found for eqn(1).
>>
>>> Is the thinking that groff has only been in base to support manpages?
>>> If so, this project makes sense.  But even so, some clarification of the
>>> intent is needed.
>>
>> The use of (g)roff for anything but man pages is practically non-existent.
>> If you want to use it for typesetting, you can always install it.
>
> Would it support ps/dvi output ?

If "it" refers to groff, it always has supported PostScript.  It's
trivial to create PS output from man pages at the moment.  I don't see
dvi output as an interesting goal.

Greg
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