Re: <OK> [Groff] Simplifying groff documentation

[Michael(tm) Smith]

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden>, 2006-12-24 13:01 -0500:

> Gunnar Ritter <address@hidden>:
> > But I think the most important question for troff people is,
> > where is a complete, high-quality converter for
> > 
> >            +-------------+/       +===========+
> >            | XML-DocBook |=======>|   troff   |  ?
> >            +-------------+\       +===========+
> > 
> > With <?troff .request?> processing instructions, this makes
> > it possible to retain all the typographical aspects we like.
> > 
> > XSL-FO to troff is also worth consideration.
> 
> XSL-FO to troff would be far more appropriate.  XSL and troff are at about
> the same level; thus, you wouldn't have to wire in all the policy/styling
> decisions you would in a DocBook->troff renderer.

Exactly. There are lots of XML vocabularies other than DocBook --
at least one of them that's very widely used -- TEI -- and for
which there are open-source stylesheets for generating XSL-FO
output (the TEI project has some very good stylesheets). So XSL-FO
is the best choice for a mechanism for generating portable
presentation output from presentation-neutral XML markup
vocabularies like DocBook and TEI.

All we need are some better free-sofware XSL-FO engines.

Steve Cheng announced at one time that he was working on an XSL-FO
to roff engine. I don't know how far he managed to get.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://www.w3.org/People/Smith/