Re: [Groff] The case against the case against .EX/.EE & .DS/.DE

[Eric S. Raymond]

Meg McRoberts <address@hidden>:
> Personally, what I really miss in the -man macros are the list macros from
> mm -- .VL, BL, .DL, et cetera.

I sympathsize, but that is an extension that would create more severe
compatibility problems.  Given that, as you say,

>                               .IP and .TP do work but are a bit awkward. 

I would have to recommend against it.
 
> It also seems like tables in man pages don't work when I create HTML pages
> out of -man source.  Eric, do your tools handle tables well?  I don't try
> to do any fancy tbl stuff in man pages...

Yes, doclifter maps any TBL table losslessly to XML-DocBook <table> or
<informaltable> markup, even handling the odd cases like spanning rows
and columns.  The HTML you render from that with Norm Walsh's standard
DocBook stylesheets will be well-formed HTML-tables.

There's a bit of a problem in the other direction, unfortunately.
Norm Walsh's XML-DocBook stylesheets have a man-markup output mode,
but it doesn't render tables to TBL markup.  

Steve Cheng's docbook2man does do that, however.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>