I've looked at the kind of PDFs heirloom troff can make, on an iPad, and my eyes... | Hacker News

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cogburnd02 on Feb 23, 2015 | parent | context | favorite | on: Tell HN: Groff needs your help

I've looked at the kind of PDFs heirloom troff can make, on an iPad, and my eyes, just, wow. There aren't words. If Debian would put heirloom troff in its base-install (along with, say, E.B Garamond or Junicode) instead of groff, there'd probably be more people (1) making beautiful man pages, and (2) viewing man pages graphically (with evince or another PDF viewer) than ever before. It's not like there's a licensing problem, AFAICT.

I have not seen a PDF made by mandoc that made me react that way. :-|

bentley on Feb 23, 2015 [–]

Yes, PDF output is one place where mandoc is not as good as groff/heirloom yet. (The other major one being support for generic preprocessors and other macro sets.) Mandoc works very well for terminal output, HTML output, and semantic searching though.

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