Re: [Groff] groff_ms.man

[Larry Kollar]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:

> > Part of my problem with all things TeX is that they tend to insist
> > on a certain format -- Harvard numbering, body text lines up with
> > headings -- that went out of style 15 years ago outside of academia.
> 
> The format texinfo uses is intentionally strict to give a uniform
> appearance for all manuals.

I don't mind the intentionally strict part, it's the outdated
look that I'm whining about.


> ... The LaTeX team recommends to use other packages.  For
> example, my favourite class (especially for German) is `koma-script'.

If I have to deal with LaTeX at all, I fire up LyX. Now there's a
program that gets out of your way & lets you *write*.


> > One can say that groff shares the same problem, but I'm slowly
> > working on a macro package to take care of it.
> 
> Hear, hear!  Details, please.

I'd mentioned it before, although I haven't made much progress
since the last time. The goal is to allow for modern-looking
documents (thus the name -modern) -- headings in a complementary
font (I like Bookman for body type and Avant Garde for headings,
but that's just me), indent the body relative to the headings,
emphasis on structural markup (.EM instead of .I and so on)... and
if you prefer, you can turn off all that and have it look just
like something done with -ms or -me.

As a stepping stone, I had a neat idea for a -mltr (letter)
package requiring no markup at all. I'd like to get the manpage
for groff -man beat into shape first.

-- 
Larry Kollar   k o l l a r  at  a l l t e l . n e t
"Strange that people always suggest commercial systems when the
phrase 'mission critical' comes up." -- Sebastian Rahtz, on XML-Doc