[Groff] announcing groff version 1.16

[Werner LEMBERG]

[Just curious: Since ages I haven't seen any announcement on the
various GNU announcement newsgroups.  Is this a local problem with GNU
newsgroups here or were there no announcements indeed?]


This is the announcement of groff version 1.16.  Please post it to the
relevant GNU newsgroups after the new groff version has appeared on
ftp.gnu.org.

Thanks in advance


    Werner


======================================================================

                              Announcing

                          GROFF version 1.16


A new version of the GNU troff document formatting system is available.

Below you can find the relevant portions of the NEWS file, documenting
all user-visible changes.

As usual, groff-1.16.tar.gz can be found at

                     ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/groff

Due to a new directory structure, no diff file relative to the last
version has been created (which would be larger than the new
distribution archive itself), only an xdelta file
(groff-1.15-1.16.tar.gz.xdelta)

Have fun!


    Ted HARDING <address@hidden>
    Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden>


VERSION 1.16
============

Groff
-----

The anachronism of calling the man macro package with `-man' has been
fixed; now you can say `-m man' also.  The same is true for `ms',
`me', `markup', `mandoc', and `mdoc'.

A new switch `-g' for calling `grn' is available.

A new switch `-G' for calling `grap' is available.

EBCDIC support for tty devices has been added.  On such hosts, IBM
code page 1047 is available with -Tcp1047 instead of -Tascii and
-Tlatin1 (and, for the moment, -Tutf8).  Note that non-tty devices are
not yet supported (but installed).

Troff
-----

A new command line option to the `man' macros is available: `-rSxx'
(with `xx' either 10, 11, or 12) to set the base document font size to
`xx' points.  Additionally, `.SH' now produces larger headings than
`.SS'.

To solve a problem with the .PSPIC macro which needs the `-U' switch
of troff to access an external program (psbb), a new request .psbb is
now available to get the bounding box of a PostScript image file.  The
values (in PostScript units) are returned in the new read-only number
registers `llx', `lly', `urx', and `ury'.  Consequently, .PSPIC has
been adapted to use the new request, and the psbb program has been
removed.

A new predefined writable number register, `year', has been added.  It
contains the current year.

A new read-only register, `.Y', has been added.  It contains the
revision number of the groff package.

`\fP' now behaves as expected in situations like the following where
the font `foo' is undefined:

  .B bold text
  normal text \f[foo]bar\fP normal text

Previously, the text after \fP appeared as bold.

The `substring' request is not new, but hasn't been documented before.

The predefined `.T' string register (which holds the current output
device) is not new, but hasn't been documented before.

A new request `length' computes the length of a string and returns it
in a number register.

The macro files `tmac.a4' (for specifying A4 paper format) and
`tmac.trace' (a debugging aid) are now installed also.

A new resource file, `troffrc-end', is now available.  It is invoked
after all user-specified macros.  Currently used by the html device to
include tmac.html; thus no need for users to specify -mhtml anymore.

The soft hyphen character now has a glyph name: `shc'.

The latin-1 character 173 (PS name `periodcentered') has got the troff
glyph name `pc' and is no longer intermixed with the symbol character
`md' (PS name `mathdot').

ASCII character 34 (PS name `quotedbl') has got the troff glyph name
`dq' (which is an alias to character `"').

ASCII character 39 (PS name `quoteright') has got the troff glyph name
`cq' (which is an alias to character "'").

Some additions to the font description files have been implemented for
better support of HTML output:

  The new format of lines in the `charset' subsection of font
  description files is

     name metrics type code [entity_name] [-- comment]

  Currently, only the font description files in devhtml use the
  optional entity_name string to define glyph entities in HTML.
  Everything after the entity_name field is ignored; in case this
  field isn't used, two hyphen characters are now necessary to start a
  comment.

  Two new requests are available in DESC files (currently used only
  with grohtml):

    use_charnames_in_special
      This command indicates that troff should encode named characters
      inside special commands.

    pass_filenames
      requests that troff tells the driver the source file name being
      processed.  This is achieved by another tcommand: `F filename'.

Grotty
------

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> contributed support for UTF8
output.

Grohtml
-------

Added .LINE macro to tmac.arkup.

The obsolete `.LINK' macro has been removed.

.URL, .FTP, and .MAILTO macros now accept an optional third argument
which will be immediately appended to the second argument (to be used
with punctuation, for example).

Grodvi
------

The font size 11pt has been changed to 10.95pt (as used in LaTeX 2e).

A new font file CWI (using cmitt10; this is typewriter italic) has been
added.

Grolbp
------

A new driver for Canon CAPSL printers (LBP-4 and LBP-8 series laser
printers).  This code has been contributed by Francisco Andres Verdu
<address@hidden>.

Grn
---

A new preprocessor to process gremlin pictures.  It is based on the
original Berkeley implementation of grn, written by David Slattengren
and Barry Roitblat, and has been adapted to groff by Daniel
Senderowicz <address@hidden> and Werner Lemberg <address@hidden>.

Pic
---

Added the `srand' command to set the seed for a new sequence of
pseudo-random numbers to be returned by `rand'.

Gxditview
---------

Simplified installation: The Imakefile will now be configured (by
groff's configure script).

Documentation
-------------

Three new man pages are available: groff_tmac.5 (documenting how troff
macros are accessed and where they are found), groff.7 (a short
reference of the GNU roff language), and roff.7 (a general survey on
GNU troff).

Miscellaneous
-------------

A port to win32 (for use with Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0) is now part of
the distribution.  It has been contributed by Blake McBride
<address@hidden>.

More information about programs, macros, documentation, etc., which is
related to groff has been collected in the file `MORE.STUFF'.