Re: <OK> [Groff] Simplifying groff documentation

[Gunnar Ritter]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:

> > For some uses, the generated troff code could also be edited
> > directly instead of the source document.  This is what I already do
> > with my OpenDocument-to-troff converter - no sane person would want
> > to edit OpenDocument manually in order to create a book.
>
> Hmm.  Here I disagree.  Working on intermediate files is not fun.
> Instead, I strongly prefer the tagging within the source code as
> described above.
>
> On the other side I must admit that I have never done this, so I speak
> from a theoretical point of view.  Maybe it's not possible to foresee
> what the converter exactly does (which I hope not), and tagging of the
> intermediate file is really necessary.  However, this should be
> reduced to the absolute minimum.

It depends. For a technical document in DocBook that
is printed or otherwise formatted in many revisions, it
is certainly a bad idea to do anything in the converted
troff code; this is exactly what XML processing
instructions would be useful for.

On the other hand, a document in more traditional
publishing, with a first edition and at most minor
changes for later editions, and with an author who
hands in a pile of rubbish as markup, editing the
generated file may well be the best thing to do.

This is especially so if the source documents are
Microsoft Word files.

        Gunnar