Re: [Groff] Rewrite loom

[Jon Snader]

On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 12:49:43PM +0100, Bernd Warken wrote:
> I'm planning to rewrite the loom program from scratch for groff.
> 
> How important is compatibility?
> 

There's not much to be compatible with since loom is a pretty simple
application.  I would certainly like any new version to to do the same
thing with a given set of files as the old version did.  Otherwise, a
loom user would either have to maintain two versions of loom or rewrite
existing files.

> Should the naming be (g)loom?

Sure, why not?

> 
> Is the functionality of loom enough?
> 

Given the ability to filter the source before it is inserted into the
troff stream, loom is already extensible.  For example, during layout
I sometimes needed to break a C listing at a logical place.  I would
place
/address@hidden/
at the appropriate place in the C source file, and the loom filter
(a simple awk script) would insert the .bp for me.

To tell the truth, I'm not sure what other functionality would be useful,
but I may be suffering from a lack of imagination.  I suppose switches
to do standard things like mapping \ to \\ would be useful, but it's so
easy to do with the filter, that I didn't miss the built-in ability.

Thanks for taking this on, Bernd.  Until you actually have to embed
program source into a troff file it's hard to see why you'd need a
program like loom.  Once you try to do it, the need becomes clear.

Jon Snader