Re: Regressions in UTP document (was: removing the .IX macro from the ms package in 1.23 breaks old documents)

[G. Branden Robinson]

[self-follow-up]

At 2024-10-03T20:53:05-0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > The switch to Times-Roman from the requested mono-spaced font is down
> > to commit 1d8452fb2ae3afd9bb8cb8a7f7f31741d41e85da.
> 
> I'll need to see what the document is asking for, then (I confess I
> haven't paid attention to UTP recently because it seemed like it got
> kind of stuck for a while and I stopped checking up on it--sorry), but
> if one asks for fonts that don't exist, one shouldn't expect to get
> them.  That's a NEWS item.

Ah, I see--no commits in 4 years.

But also I see this in the README.md.

"Note: The transcription project predated Plan 9 and its derivatives.
Thus, the recreated source and macros were written for groff, and we
made no attempt to be compatible with the original troff. Patches for
Heirloom or Neatroff (if needed) are welcome!"

So the project acknowledges that it would like to be more portable than
it is.  One aspect of that is using only font names that are appropriate
to each targeted *roff.

This does not strike me as a grievous regression, but as a case of groff
going out of its way to accommodate AT&T troff font names under for what
should have been a transition period but got stuck in the "on" position
for decades.

Kind of like how a successor to the `hpfcode` request was implemented
and in place by 1991, and wholly transitioned away from within groff
itself (and, let's be honest, groff was probably the _only_ user because
few understood its hyphenation code system or had both a need to develop
support for input in other languages and the ability to do so--this was
8 years before Trent Fisher contribted the nucleus of our Texinfo
manual, which started to shed some light on these matters), but for 33
years the old request lingered.

There's a _lot_ of stuff like this in groff.

Heck, Ingo's been lobbying for us to kill hdtbl outright for years.

Regards,
Branden

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