Neatroff – a new implementation of the Troff typesetting system (2017) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Neatroff – a new implementation of the Troff typesetting system (2017) [pdf]

litcave.rudi.ir

49 pointssmartmic8 comments

We were looking at moving 9front's implementation of troff to neatroff at one point. It may still happen, but there are a lot of small differences between the current troff, some of the scripts and tools in the current document processing pipeline, and neatroff that need reconciling.

Until 2017, I kept my resume in troff (well, groff, really). After searching a bit, I finally re-did it in LaTex.

So I have to ask why? Going up a level to http://litcave.rudi.ir/, it's for the author's own personal needs, but what needs could possibly motive what we see there? I'm astounded.

Needs can go pretty high! I'm seeing this at the level of aesthetic and self-actualization.

My curiosity is piqued by the mention on the web page:

    I no longer use X11.

And then proceeds to present his own framebuffer and rendering applications. I presume in order to show the PDFs and such that his processor creates.

I'm just curious about his operating environment and workflow that led to this, and, perhaps, what he is doing today.

I used to keep my resume in LaTeX until around that time, but I keep it in neatroff, without any macro sets, since then. In LaTeX, because of the macros and packages, I did not have full control of everything. My candidates were switching to troff or pure TeX.

One advantage is, the troff tutorial (Brian Kerningham 1978), Nroff/Troff User's Manual and Neatroff user manual are not more than 80 pages in total. Another, neatroff easily uses any OTF/TTF font you like.

If you're looking for something that fixes many of the problems of latex (and has gained quite a lot of traction), you could use Typst.

It has a far nicer syntax and is quite a lot more capable.

Can't tell if it's open source or not. My experience with closed source text formatters (Frame, Word of course, something else that doesn't come to mind) is that either (A) the proprietary company changes format rendering all your valuable documents unusable or (B) licensing fees go up, you decide not to pay those pirates the ransom and all your valuable documents are rendered unusable.

Open source code for text formatters. It's the only option for long-lived documents.

It's open source.

Everything about it is open source except for a little web app thing (which is a really nice one, but you don't have to use it).

I am using Typst to write my dissertation along with git and it's great.

They have several pieces to the project at https://github.com/typst .

The comemo package actually seems quite useful for everyone that writes Rust, regardless of if it's related to Typst or typesetting at all. Though, I don't write much Rust, so take that with a bag of salt.

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