Broff and a proposed net project

[guy at rlgvax.UUCP]

	What is really needed is a new approach with new concepts for
	text processing.  I don't think that a text processing in a
	programming language flavour is a solution.  This will be just
	a tool made by programmers for programmers.  It would certainly
	not help our typist pool.  To have things done more interactively
	would be a better idea.

Amen.  Admittedly, I'm prejudiced, having written most of an interactive
editor-formatter (i.e., a word processor) that runs under UNIX, but I find
that it's a lot nicer to work with that nroff/troff.  For one thing, there's
a lot less of the "edit-nroff-correct-nroff again-..." cycle.  For some
applications, like producing a book, a post-processor might be better (although
I don't know that it is); but even there, it's possible to do a lot better
than nroff/troff - for example, Knuth's TeX seems more powerful and seems to
have a less baroque and difficult language.  Our main use for nroff/troff here
is with documents that have already been written using it, and for UNIX manual
pages.  "broff" would be useful for programmers and other people working
at shops which make heavy use of "nroff" and don't want to convert to
something new, however.

	By the way, if you are continuing this project, keep the
	hyphenation algorithm as clean as it is now. It's now trivial
	to put a different algorithm in, f.i. for Dutch.

You might want to post something about how to do this, in case other people
have the same requirements.  If you know how the ".ht" (Hyphenation Threshhold)
request works (from what I can see, there's some value assigned to each digram,
and only digrams with values at or above the threshhold are hyphenated), you
might post that too...

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,mcnc,we13,brl-bmd,allegra}!rlgvax!guy