13 Jan
2022
13 Jan
'22
1:54 a.m.
On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 9:01 PM Blake McBride <blake1024(a)gmail.com> wrote:
No. It isn't. It is an Adobe product.
Up to a point, Minister. PDF/A is an ISO standard that tracks PDF 1.4 or
PDF 1.7. It is meant for creating archivable PDFs, so it excludes linked
fonts (as opposed to embedded ones, which are allowed), JavaScript,
audio/video, encryption, external references, etc. For troff purposes, we
don't need any of that, so it's just a matter of setting the metadata
correctly. ISO standards can be withdrawn, but they remain available; I
doubt this one will be, since libraries are depending on it. There are
lots of FLOSS toolkits to generate PDFs.
2. Drop DVI? Are you kidding me? Although PDF may
be popular now,
Well, provided
there are DVI-to-whatever converters then. it's a systems
problem. What we really need is gcc support for some processor that is
easy to emulate (at least the userland). Historically that was MIPS; now
it's probably RISC/V. Or, I suppose, MMIX; there is a very partial Verilog
description at <https://github.com/tommythorn/fpgammix> that would make it
possible to create a hardware integer MMIX CPU using FPGAs.
And .PDF isn't?
that may not be the case 20 years from now. A device-independent
format is what is needed, and that's what
DVI is. TeX is guaranteed
to produce the exact same output 100 years from now.