I used to post articles related to this topic here, but at some point
I thought it better to dedicate this website exclusively to its original
purpose, which is to publish my literary work. I'll make an
exception for this little program I wrote in C, since it's kinda
related.
If you're a *nix user, you're surely used to edit plain text, using
your preferred text editor. While popular modern
full-featured editors like Vim or GNU Emacs come with
embedded paragraph formatting functions, with the old basic ones, like
BSD nvi, you have to use external tools like fmt(1) (which
you can also call from the editor, using key
bindings.) Anyway, as I explain in the top comment in the
code itself, none of the existing tools to format plain text paragraphs
fully satisfied me, which is why I wrote my own.
Those familiar with unix-like systems know well what troff is,
a very versatile tag like text formatting language, which among other
things has been used by many to give format to published known
books. To edit my novels I used groff, the GNU
version. Well, the code I'm posting here, apart from
improving some features present in other fmt versions also brings an
innovation to make it easier (and safer) to work with troff files.
Download
(fmtroff.c)
Tested in OpenBSD and Linux. I hope you'll find it
useful.
Changelog
- Nov 7, 2023 (bug). Fixed an error created with the last
changes.
- Oct 8, 2023 Now I rewrote the code again this time using
libc and wide char functions.
- Oct 1, 2023 I changed VLA arrays by pointers in most
functions.
- Sep 8, 2023 Except for ‘new line’ and ‘tab’ (\n and \f),
fmtroff strips all control characters. Today, reading an
interesting thread in groff mailing list, I learned that, with roff you
can use the ‘leader’ or ‘SOH’ character in tables and
indices. So, I modified the code to, in troff mode, fmtroff
let pass that character.
- Ago 24, 2023 (bug): Today I discovered that it's necessary
to allocate memory before entering the loop that reads the file (or
input string). Without this, calling fmtroff from a text
editor (nvi or vim) on an empty file produces a segfault.
- Jun 28, 2023: I improved a bit the "recognize and skip some
initialisms" conditional, now it ignores leading quotes and brackets and
takes also in care non ASCII uppercase letters.
- Apr 25, 2023 (bug): Years passed without using iso-latin, I
didn't realize until yesterday, while using OpenBSD wscons, that
iso-latin characters made fmtroff hang. It took a minimal
change in a conditional to fix the bug, this means that now the utf-8
limitation is only applicable to multibyte characters.
- Apr 6, 2023 (bug): When in troff mode or when the
‘-n’ option is not used, treat lines starting with
‘'’ (single quotes) in the same way as those starting with a
period, as the former can also be troff macro lines.
- Apr 5, 2023: Don't add extra space after a ASCII ellipsis
when it opens the line.
- Mar 28, 2023: New option ‘-l’ to allow sentences
begin with lower case (useful with man pages where to begin a sentence
with a command name is recurrent.
- Mar 25, 2023 (bug): Ignore a word when its number of
characters is grater than the established column width.
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