🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <PCG.90Dec31155754@teachk.cs.aber.ac.uk>:
>Well, it virtually ensures that quantizing will be approximate, even if
>by very little. 1/65k of a point is an exceedingly fine resolution, and
>even if the real device resolution is not (as it is *very* rarely) a
>factor of 1/65k, the resulting error is usually negligible.
>
>Ditroff though avoids even this negligible source of errors by being
>parametric with respect to the actual hirzontal and vertical resolutions
>of the intended output device, and ensuring that all motions and sizes
>are in fact even multiples of these resolutions, and by declaring in its
>output for which resolutions all motions and sizes are meant.

Perhaps, but ditroff format (at least the one I worked with) has its
limitations too. When I wrote the ditdvi converter I rediscovered that
widths have to under 256 because they are stored as one byte in the
fontdesc file. This means that everything has to be scaled so that the
widest character is under 256 units. This is another source of
quantization error when adapting to real-world devices.

In practice I have found TeX's spacing and placement decisions to be
superior to *roff's. So I'm biased. :-)

Again, the real point is that there is no technical hindrance to using
TeX for man pages. Somebody just has to put in the work in macros and
backends.