Re: [Groff] Introduction

[Larry Kollar]

Meg McRoberts wrote:

> > I've been fiddling with OpenOffice lately.
>
> In this context, I consider OpenOffice to be equivalent to Word
> (yeah, I know, at least it's not a proprietary format and all).

And that things basically *work* in OOo.


> For technical documents, I need a lot more flexibility than Word
> can give.  I would like to be able to write a bunch of small docs
> that could then be sourced into a big manual, mixed and matched.

Of course, that's easy to do with *roff. It might be possible with
OpenOffice before too long as well. You might be interested in a
lengthy entry I wrote on my blog last week, in which I talked about
some possible content management scenarios:
http://farmanor.blogspot.com/2005/10/laziness-and-open-document- 
format.html


> > The output from grohtml is good enough, or can be with just
> > a little help, that Word should be able to open it easily.
>
> I prefer HTML as an output format from the same source that can also
> generate PS, PDF, formatted ASCII...  It's great to get a technical
> document into HTML to display on the web but if I want a printed
> copy, the HTML doc isn't compact enough to be satisfying...

Which are all arguments for using groff, of course. Edit and manage
individual topics, preferably under source control, pull them together
as needed, and create a PDF. If co-workers need a topic or three in
a format Weird can deal with, make an HTML file.

I really ought to ask our translation vendors if they can deal with
markup in ASCII files instead of FrameMaker. Even if they're not
doing the DTP end, if they send back translated source in Unicode,
it wouldn't be hard to handle.

--
Larry Kollar     k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival"
http://home.alltel.net/kollar/utp/