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From: j...@jclark.UUCP (James Clark)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: What features would you like in GNU troff?
Message-ID: <JJC.89May31220314@jclark.UUCP>
Date: 31 May 89 21:03:14 GMT
Sender: j...@jclark.UUCP
Distribution: comp
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Lines: 26

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.

I would welcome suggestions both for completely new features and for
extensions or improvements to existing features. If there are any
obscure, undocumented features of the original troff that aren't used
by standard macro packages and that you think should be preserved, I
would like to hear about them; since I've never seen the source, I may
not know about such features.  I would also be interested to learn
about extensions implemented in other troffs (particularly the current
Bell Labs version).

So far it has almost all V7 troff features, as well as most ditroff
features and obvious extensions such as long names. I am trying to
make it sufficiently compatible that tbl, eqn and pic will work with
it unchanged and standard macro packages will work with at most a few,
simple changes.  It can produce both TeX .dvi and PostScript output,
and uses TeX .tfm font metric files. It's written in C++. It's still
quite a long way from being ready for release.

Post if you feel it appropriate, but in any case please email me as
some news seems to get lost on its way here.

James Clark
j...@jclark.uucp