> 2. Drop DVI? Are you kidding me? Although PDF may be popular now,
> 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.
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?
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 ISO standards can be withdrawn, but they remain available; I doubt this one will be, since libraries are depending on it.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.