[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Larry McVoy]

+1 

You should share your scripts, I've done similar stuff and other people
have sometimes found it useful.

I do the same thing with the invis stuff, super handy.

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 08:21:26AM -0700, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> Larry McVoy writes:
> > BTW, I still find pic really useful, ...
> 
> I use pic all the time.  One of the things that I find most useful, which
> is unfortunately not supported by things like xfig, is invisible elements.
> I draw most complicated pictures by constructing scaffold of invisible items
> and hanging the visible items onto it.  That way, if I start running out of
> space I can just shrink the scaffold.  Sure beats having to rescale piles of
> elements and then move them around in WYSIWYG packages.
> 
> Also, as part of the book project, I have a script that I've written that
> converts the original troff source into OpenOffice XHTML since my publisher
> won't do troff.  Not a serious script as it just looks for macro names, it
> doesn't expand and interpret all of the low-level requests.  But, part of
> the script extracts pic images into separate files, runs them through groff,
> converts the output to PDF, converts that to SVG, runs it through inkscape
> in batch mode to crop excess whitespace from the image, and then imports it
> into the OpenOffice documents.  Of course, while SVG is the only vector
> graphics format that OpenOffic supports, it makes a mess of it and converts
> it to bitmaps internally.  But, it works with the publisher's production
> toolchain as they can work on the SVG images separately.
> 
> Once again, a testament to "little languages" and "composable tools".
> 
> Jon

-- 
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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm