Re: .TQ to replace .PD 0

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Igno,

> We actually do have partial control over a significant portion of
> existing manual pages, by virtue of some relevant people participating
> in the list <groff@gnu.org>.
...
> Admittedly and for good reasons, huge numbers of individual, portable
> software packages also provide manual pages, and we have no direct
> access to the developers of those.  Then again, when those people

I take your point, but I think your outlook is biased to the
free-software operating systems.  In addition to the man pages of the
many individual projects, which you acknowledged, there's also the
commercial OS like AIX.  Not forgetting Humm's Plan 9.  :-)

> Regarding new text formatters and markup languages, i don't see much
> need for them.  Over the decades, most other attempts turned out much
> worse than ROFF and LaTeX, including practically all that are
> significantly younger

I agree if it were just to be another troff or Lout, but the modern
graphics model of PDF has moved on a lot from theirs and isn't targeted.
Images and SVG as first-class objects.  Transformation matrices.
Advanced colour handling.  Text-flow layout.  Support of modern font
technologies and of course languages which aren't left-to-right.  More
DTP like https://www.scribus.net than academic paper.  There's lots of
experimentation which could be done to see if a textual language which
allowed straightforward text entry would have use with today's printing.

Sometimes it's right to start from scratch and to allow much more
breaking change as different approaches are tried.  Again, we're back to
Plan 9.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.