Re: [Groff] Re: Simplifying groff documentation

[Michael(tm) Smith]

Larry Kollar <address@hidden>, 2007-01-04 07:58 -0500:

> FO is sort of a "roach hotel" language in
> an XML sense -- once you have FO, you're not going to
> transform it to any other XML markup.

True, I guess that it's not likely that you'll be transforming it
to vocabularies other than FO. There's no good reason why you'd
want to. But you can furthe manipulate it programatically using
XSLT and XML parsing tools.

> Besides, there are other forms of markup -- namely, *roff and
> *TeX -- that already do a great job of typesetting and are Free.
> Why not replace FO with one or the other?

I guess one reason might be because roff and TeX are both
system-dependent in the sense that they can only be used with
troff/groff and TeX. FO is system-independent in the sense that it
can be used with any system that complies with the XSL-FO spec.
And neither troff/groff or TeX are standards for which a formal
specification exists (as far as I know).

And FO files can be manipulated using XML parsing tools and XSLT.
You may not personally find that to be of great benefit, but a
good number of people do (ask Norm Walsh, for one).

> It's computationally a similar step and you don't have to wait
> for FOP or xmlroff to get up to snuff.

Nope. You only have to wait for the DocBook-to-troff and
DocBook-to-TeX mechanisms to get up to snuff.

Anyway, I'm not personally waiting for FOP or xmlroff. I use XEP
and it works quite well.

  --Mike

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