Re: [Groff] HTML fonts

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > I think that the current font setup is not optimal.  If I read the
> > code correctly, grohtml only honours R, B, I, BI, and C, ignoring
> > the font family.
> 
> yes that is right. It would be good to make it use the font face html
> operator - if it is standard html?

What is the `font face html operator'?  Please explain. 

I think it is best if you restrict grohtml to <b>, <it>, <em>, and
<tt> (have I missed a font switch?) -- if the user really wants to
specify a font face, overriding the settings in the user's browser, he
should use HTML code (via yet-to-be-defined macros in tmac.arkup).

> The minor problem is that the grohtml driver has to generate html
> and postscript (for tbl, pic, eqn) - thus it does need the S font.
> The grand plan was to make grohtml examine the regions of glyphs to
> see whether any S font encoding is not understood by html character
> set - then build a region for the postscript device - to generate an
> image.  Rather than depend on pic/tbl/eqn telling grohtml when an
> image starts & stops.

After reading design.ms (again), I think that (iii) in the html.cc
overview section is not ideal.

IMHO, HTML shouldn't use fonts at all.  It should use entities only,
interspersed with markups.  All glyphs available in `S' should *only*
be accessed via groff names and not directly with the char code --
otherwise it would fail on other output devices anyway.  As a
consequence, `fonts' in devhtml should look similar to the font
descriptions in devutf8, i.e., all available entities should be
collected in a single R.proto file.

It makes no sense to mimic PS behavior for HTML output, I believe.

> I'm not sure whether we could get rid of the other font files since
> if these fonts were used in a picture/tbl then the positioning
> would be incorrect.

???  Please explain.

> Also the problem you mentioned before about "pre-defined" in the
> man.1 page being rendered as pre- defined.  This is occuring because
> troff places pre- at the right hand margin and defined on the left
> hand margin. Ie it splits the word (even with hyphernation off).

A minor thing:  It is `hyphenation', not `hyphernation' :-)

> Is there a troff command to disable this feature?

I suggest to add the following line to tmac.html:

  .cflags 0 -\(hy\(em\(en

> I've got a long "to do list" which I'm more than willing to
> post if anyone else would like to help fix grohtml bugs?

Yes, please post, or maybe it's better to update design.ms, filling up
the TODO list?


    Werner


PS: Have you ever tried the program `unroff'?  It does a quite nice
    job in translating troff->html.