As the title says, fmtroff is another version of the old
fmt(1) that you'll find in any unix-like
system[*]. This version, apart from improving some features
present in other fmt versions also brings an innovation to
make it easier (and more reliable) to work with roff files (to edit my novels I used groff, the GNU version.)
Download
(fmtroff.c)
Tested in OpenBSD and Linux. I hope you'll find it
useful.
(*) Probably you won't find
fmt(1) in the default install in some Linux distributions
since Linux has always wanted to look like its adoptive daddy,
MSWindows.
Changelog
- Jan 28, 2025. Removed two abreviations I'd added
by mistake.
- Jan 6, 2025. In "troff" mode, in addition to lines
starting with a period or apostrophe, also ignore those starting with a
backslash.
- Oct 26, 2024. Recognize backslash '\'
as begin-of-sentence character. This allows the use roff and LaTeX tags
at the beginning of a sentence (eg \fI or
\emph{).
- Oct 1, 2024. I decided to revert the changes made
on August 10th and 22nd since they complicated the code just to cover
isolated cases.
- Set 26, 2024. Yesterday I noticed that when
running fmtroff on Chinese text many characters were deleted,
shortening the string. This was happening on Linux, as I
normally use OpenBSD (and I don't usually write in Chinese either ;-)) I
hadn't noticed it. After some research, I realized that the
cause was in collapse_whitespace(), where I was using
isblank() instead of iswblank(). I
thought that in this case it was not necessary to use the wide-character
version of the function, but I was wrong.
- Ago 22, 2024. Before saving the variable explained
in the previous item, check that the word contains only letters to make
sure that it is a person's name.
- Ago 10, 2024. Save to a variable if the present
word is capitalized to recognize if the next is an initialism.
- May 9, 2024. I simplified the code a bit.
- May 7, 2024. Added the ‘-m’ option,
when used fmtroff skips mail headers and quoted text (I added
this option just to be consistent with the original use of
fmt(1)).
- May 7, 2024. Changed the option ‘-t’ to
‘-b’ and the option ‘-l’ to ‘-o’ for
compatibility with OpenBSD fmt(1).
- May 6, 2024. Now fmtroff skips nested
code (tbl(1), pic(1), eqn(1).) Thanks
to Victor <vico at tuta dot io> for pointing it out to
me.
- 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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