[TUHS] TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Jon Forrest]

On 1/10/22 11:00 AM, Blake McBride wrote:

> I like that groff and TeX are rock solid and well supported. 

> Sadly, however, if word of their existence doesn't get out there, I see 
> them both disappearing in not much longer than a generation.  This would 
> be sad indeed.

TeX badly need an official rewrite in a modern programming language
(e.g. Go, Rust, even C). The rewrite should drop support for the
.dvi format, and use .pdf instead. It should also make use of
modern hardware capabilities and not have any built-in limits
to how much memory gets used.

These issues are well recognized by the TeX community but with
Knuth not willing to be the BDFL, TeX is floundering.

(I don't mean any of this as criticism of TeX. It's a truly
miraculous program that was created in a different time.)

Jon