Heirloom Documentation Tools 061212 review

The Heirloom Documentation Tools package provides troff, nroff, and related utilities to format manual pages and other documents for

License: CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) File size: 0K Developer: Gunnar Ritter

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The Heirloom Documentation Tools package provides troff, nroff, and related utilities to format manual pages and other documents for output on terminals and printers. Heirloom Documentation Tools are portable and enhanced versions of the utilities released by Sun as part of OpenSolaris, which are a variant of ditroff, which, in turn, descends to the historical Unix troff that generated output for the C/A/T phototypesetter.

nroff is most prominently used to format Unix manual pages for viewing them on a terminal. This implementation consumes relatively few system resources and is thus suitable for small system distributions. It has been enhanced to generate UTF-8 output.

troff generates PostScript output from the same document source code as nroff. Thus a special use of it is to prepare manual pages for printing. troff is a general-purpose typesetting processor, though. Significant features that have been added in this implementation are:

troff can access PostScript Type 1, OpenType, and TrueType fonts directly, that is, it can read font metrics from AFM, OpenType, or TrueType files, and can instruct the dpost post-processor to include glyph data from PFB, PFA, OpenType, and TrueType files into the output it generates.
Mechanisms for typesetting small capitals, old-style numerals, and the missing ligatures by using Type 1 �expert� or OpenType fonts are provided.
Pairwise kerning of characters and letter space tracking are supported. troff includes a request to construct kerning pairs for characters from different fonts.
Hanging characters can be used, for example, hyphens can partially or entirely hang over the right margin of a document.
Letters can be of arbitrary size, including fractional point sizes. Individual fonts can be zoomed.
Text input is processed according to the LC_CTYPE environment variable. With a UTF-8 locale, a large set of characters is available without the need to type troff escape sequences.
Hyphenation of international languages is supported using the OpenOffice variant of Raph Levien's LibHnj, which is in turn based on the TeX method.
International paper sizes such as A4 can be configured.
The PostScript output of the dpost post-processor is expected to conform to Adobe's Document Structuring Conventions (DSC).
dpost can generate instructions for the PDF distiller for the inclusion of bookmarks, titles, and authorship information.
The default resolution has been raised to 72,000 dpi.
Long names can be used for requests, strings, and number registers, as in �.de longname�, �.longname�, etc.

What's New in This Release:
* [nt]roff: Relative numbers can be used with the ".pshape" request now;
they refer to the preceding indent and line length pair, or, for the
initial pair, to the standard indent and line lenght settings.
* [nt]roff: A warning of the "range" category is now printed when the
indent is set to a value exceeding the line length.
* troff: In ".ad p" mode, when a line break was inserted after an
existing hyphen or em dash, another hyphen was added when the previous
characters formed a kerning pair. This has been fixed.
* troff: In ".ad p" mode, when the character before the first interword
space formed a kerning pair with the space character, the line length
was incorrectly computed, and the line was prolongated by this amount.
This has been fixed.
* troff: The "{", "}", and "x" escape sequences inhibited kerning in
the adjustment computation but not in the output routine, which could
lead to prolongated output lines. They now inhibit kerning completely.
* eqn: Generated equations no longer start with "x'0'". This allows
kerning with the preceding character in an inline equation.
* nroff: The content of a "X" function is now ignored (instead of being
printed with zero width).
* nroff: Combining UTF-8 characters are now assumed to have width zero.
* nroff: The ".rd" request has been fixed; it had not been working since
the last release.
* troff: The ".rd" request now accepts locale-dependent input characters.
* [nt]roff: Fixed an error in ".ad p" mode which could lead to core dumps
with ".ev" requests that were not properly paired.
* nroff: Hyphenation of words containing non-ASCII characters now really
works; such characters were erroneously dropped with the last release,
leading to incorrect hyphenations in some cases.
* troff: Use of the "s+[n]", "s-[n]", "s+'n'", or "s-'n'" escape
sequence forms now leaves the arithmetic unit handling in a clean
state. The previous failure to do so lead to wrong numeric results
under certain circumstances; in particular, it caused the "over" eqn
keyword to produce incorrect output.