(???)     GHOLE(1)                                                 GHOLE(1)
 (???)     NAME
 (???)          ghole - gopher scripts n’ stuff
 (???)     DESCRIPTION
 (???)          okay this is my second attempt at this.
 (???)               i was uncertain about how to utilize this ‘gopher-
 (???)          hole’, but i decided to make this more of a space for long-
 (???)          form writing.
 (???)               so i initially wrote a bunch of scripts to do a bunch
 (???)          of document preparation and formatting, but i instead found
 (???)          that  ‘plan9port’ has ‘nroff’ and it actually works!
 (???)               first a little preface: the idea i had was largely in-
 (???)          spired by ‘june’ (https://causal.agency), who does all of
 (???)          her blog posts (and most of her site) formatted with ‘man-
 (???)          doc’.
 (???)               initially, i tried with emulate her work verbatim
 (???)          (which comes a bit more easily with how well ‘mandoc’ is
 (???)          documented), but i found i wasn’t as satisfied with the re-
 (???)          sults.  subsequently, i tried work with something a bit more
 (???)          complex: ‘mandoc’for header/footer and ‘troff’ with ‘me’
 (???)          macro package formatting the body of text.
 (???)               the main issue with this was that it required two dif-
 (???)          ferent means of preparation and merging the results, which
 (???)          meant that a (needlessly) complicated means of templating
 (???)          and interpolation was needed.
 (???)               the result was a bit more personalized, but it didn’t
 (???)          feel right. there were a lot of limitations to how ‘groff’
 (???)          works-namely when it comes to utf8. this wasn’t easy to work
 (???)          around, since non-ascii characters had to be purposefully
 (???)          escaped or they would be clobbered.
 (???)               so i kind of just accepted this as fact until i remem-
 (???)          bered how ‘plan9’ actually works with utf.  this led me to
 (???)          try and investigate if plan9’s ‘troff’/ ‘nroff’ would be a
 (???)          useable alternative. luckily, ‘plan9port’ actually provides
 (???)          a version that works with linux. although i was already more
 (???)          versed in how the whole ‘roff’ suite mostly works, there
 (???)          were a lot of things i still had to pick up to get what i
 (???)          wanted. to my surprise, i still had to define a couple of my
 (???)          own macros to get desired result.
 (???)               anyway, this all lead to actually simplifying a lot of
 (???)          my scripting. there are significant limitations compared to
 (???)          previous attempts (namely with list formatting) but it can
 (???)          mostly be worked around.
 (???)     TL;DR
 (???)               using plan9’s ‘nroff’ to format text documents over
 (???)          ‘groff’/‘mandoc’.
 (???)          so here’s the list of things i got:
 (???)          -    utf8.  みんな元気。
 (???)          -    automatic page offset. getting this to work with ‘man-
 (???)               doc’ would basically require passing the output through
 (???)               *another* script, and would also require more margin
 (???)               adjustments of the body of text.
 (???)          -    less templating and no ‘groff’.
 (???)          stuff i gave up:
 (???)          -    justified text (not available in ‘mandoc’ anyway).
 (???)          the code is up here:
 (???)          https://tildegit.org/nondev/ghole
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