Re: <OK> [Groff] Simplifying groff documentation

[Gunnar Ritter]

"Michael(tm) Smith" <address@hidden> wrote:

> OK, I can definitely understand that. Anyway, I think if we were
> to have a set of stylesheets for converting DocBook to troff, a
> lot of the work done in putting those together could be
> "repurposed" to create a set of stylesheets for TEI and other
> vocabularies. Most XML vocabularies have similar structures for a
> lot of the common building blocks -- ordered lists and itemized
> lists, footnotes, hyperlinks, etc.

If the target is a troff macro set, most work can be done
in troff. I find this much more convenient than to do it
in XSLT anyway; troff has actual variables and a macro
(template) call fits on a single line, to start with.

> > For most elements, the stylesheet would actually be quite
> > simple; for example, it could just convert <blockquote> to
> > .Blockquote. (Another stylesheet could convert a similar
> > non-DocBook element to the same troff macro call.)
>
> Yep, I can see that. It's the same basic case as with LaTeX.

It is also sort of reverting XML to GML :-)

        Gunnar