Re: [Groff] Status of the portability work, and plans for the future

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Looking at my code, I see there is one more exception; troff \*(an,
> horizontal arrow extension, can't be mapped either.  You'd think
> there'd be an ISO entity for this somewhere in the AMSA arrow set,
> but there isn't.  Nor have I found a Unicode equivalent.

U+23AF HORIZONTAL LINE EXTENSION

> > Hmm.  To exaggerate, the only `technical ground' currently is that
> > doclifter can't handle it.  Up to now nobody has ever claimed
> > problems with groffer.1 -- while I understand your arguments, I
> > don't see an urgent need to react immediately.
>
> I see you've forgotten Gunnar's post on this topic.  He actually
> showed how badly groffer.1 gets mangled in some viewers, with a
> screen dump.  If that doesn't constitute "urgent need", I'm not sure
> what would.

As written, I've exaggerated.  And I was aware of Gunnar's reply:
Inspite of the bad rendering of groffer.1 with KDE, nobody has
complained.

> [...] it's still improving; I just added code to parse ad-hoc tables
> made with .ta and tabs rather than TBL markup, and I think I'm going
> to be able to bite a large corner off of the .ti problem next.

Aaah.

> > According to your analysis, groffer.1 is basically the only
> > candidate which is not going to be fixed easily -- for whatever
> > reasons.  Not bad to have just one single exception out of
> > 10000...
>
> That would be one out of 13,000, and no groffer.1 isn't the only
> one.

Currently, it is, because Bernd is (currently) not willing to change
anything.  This is in contrast to the other cases where you have
errors, or where you can expect changes soon.

> This is really not good company for the groff documentation to be
> in.

I'll fix the rest of groff in due course.  However, this might only
happen after we've defined (and coded) the proposed man macro
extensions.


    Werner