Re: [Groff] groff documentation

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > A lot of packages are documented in texinfo, and the `info'
> > interface provides easy access with a uniform interface.
> 
> I would hazard a guess that many more packages are documented
> in DocBook these days.

Maybe, I don't know.

> I won't go into what I think of info's interface here -- some
> browsers like Konqueror make it somewhat palatable, but I would much
> prefer a set of HTML pages or a properly tagged PDF for online
> reading.

Is there any browser which allows searching across an HTML tree of
pages?  As long as this feature isn't available, HTML is not an option
for me.  I agree that images are a problem, and there should be an
info reader which supports them (the texinfo format itself already can
handle images).

PDF is fine for me, but you need a graphical interface.  Currently
groff->pdf with indexing features and similar things needs a lot of
additional work not available by default.  I can envision two routes
to improve that:

  groff -> dvi -> xdvipdf -> pdf
  groff -> ps -> gs -> pdf

Both methods would insert specials to support conversion.  I'm not a
pdf expert; maybe a volunteer can improve a main macro package to
support one of these routes (or both).

Until now, texinfo is quite easy to write, and the available output
formats are impressive (including DocBook, BTW).  I'm not convinced
yet that DocBook provides better typographical output, but I must
admit that I haven't tried it since texinfo does a decent job...


    Werner