Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!rna!dan From: dan@rna.UUCP (Dan Ts'o) Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Re: What features would you like in GNU troff? Message-ID: <622@rna.UUCP> Date: 4 Jun 89 18:51:05 GMT References: Reply-To: dan@rna.UUCP (Dan Ts'o) Distribution: comp Organization: Rockefeller University Neurobiology Lines: 39 In article jjc@jclark.UUCP (James Clark) writes: >I have been implementing a troff which I'm going to give to GNU, and I >would like to get some input on what features people would like to see >in it. >So far it has almost all V7 troff features, as well as most ditroff >features and obvious extensions such as long names. My understanding is fuzzy on this point, but I believe that TROFF has real problems dealing with widows and orphans. Either the one line that overflows onto the last page, or the one word that overflows onto the last line of a paragraph. It would be nice (but I know hard) to deal somehow with this. Can TROFF currently flow text around both sides of a display ? I implemented a NROFF-like program for "typesetting" BRAILLE (also does ASCII, source compatible with NROFF/TROFF). For long names, I used \{nameofanylength}. Of course macros can be of any length, and builtin commands also had more friendly aliases, like .space and .break and .page can be used for .sp, .br and .bp. There were some commands missing from TROFF that were need for BRAILLE production, like some way of putting a header string at the end of the first line of every page: This is a line of text from the user file 345 which did not contain the 345. That number was the page number. For this function, I implemented a .ri command (right indent) which takes two arguments, the amount to indent the next line at the right, and an optional string to stick in that spot. Good luck. Cheers, Dan Ts'o 212-570-7671 Dept. Neurobiology dan@rna.rockefeller.edu Rockefeller Univ. ...cmcl2!rna!dan 1230 York Ave. rna!dan@nyu.edu NY, NY 10021 tso@rockefeller.arpa tso@rockvax.bitnet