SoC project: Complete BSD-licensed text processing tools.

[Jesse Hagewood]

Hey everyone,

I'm one of the students participating in Google Summer of Code this summer,
with FreeBSD as my mentoring organization. I thought I would share my
project on this mailing list, in case it is of interest to anyone.

My project this summer is to add features and/or complete the BSD-licensed
text processing tools mdocml, diff/sdiff/diff3 (ports from OpenBSD) for the
purpose of deprecating groff and the GNU diff utilities in the FreeBSD
source tree.

The first part of my project is to add features and make improvements to
mdocml. Right now, my goal is to try to implement some text-formatting
requests that are missing from roff. The missing requests are:

.ad (adjust margins)
.na
.it
.ns (no-space mode)
.rs (no-space mode off)
.ti (temporary indent)
.ta (tab settings)
.hy (hyphenation)
.ne
.nh
.ni
.ps

I will be spending most of this week implementing them. So far, I have been
working on .ns and .rs, and will have them successfully working probably by
the end of the day.

If you'd like to learn more, here is the project's wiki page:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2012/JesseHagewood

SVN repo:
https://socsvn.freebsd.org/socsvn/soc2012/jhagewood/

Also, any questions/comments/criticisms would be greatly appreciated!


-Jesse Hagewood