Re: [Groff] rtf (word) output

[Werner LEMBERG]

Hallo 21150918!

(You are from Alpha Centauri, right?  I was told people there don't
have names but numbers :-)


> I had an idea of a rtf output by means of a combination of a sed
> script and a tmac file.  The tmac file mimics mm macros and outputs
> rtf (as a plain ascii file with the -Tascii (-Tlatin1) option), and
> the whole project is preceded by a sed script managing the inline
> requests.  So that the idea is that I can take a normal groff.mm
> source code file, preprocess it with the sed script, process it with
> my "m2l.tmac" instead of "mm.tmac" and get the rtf output.

While this might work in general you get only a very low-level
representation of the output which is not very useful for further
editing.  If your main goal is to convert a groff document to
something which, say, MS Word can immediately print, your solution
looks fine.  If you intend to edit it further it will probably become
a nightmare.

> Perhaps it will be the better choice to output direct rtf; or
> perhaps it would be wise to leave the project in the limited area
> where it is.

I can't comment because I haven't seen your code yet.

> Is someone interested in either trying how it works or looking into
> it and giving advice whether this method can lead *anywhere*?  I
> wrote a bash script that manages the process and made a tarball out
> of it with a size of roughly 8500kb containing the tmac file, the
> script and a readme.  Well this is a bit plain cooking because I'm
> no programmer at all.

Assuming that your your tarball is not 8500kb but 8.5kb you might send
it to the list so that other people can try it.


     Werner