Re: [Groff] groff as a wiki langauge?

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > It's not clear to me why you get such bad formatting results. 
>
> Partly because it's difficult to strip away the non wiki content
> from the web page (navigation bar, advertisement on the corner,
> "feed back" input textarea);

???  Those visual elements aren't part of the wiki text itself,
AFAIK.  How can they disturb?  But maybe I'm misunderstanding.

> Partly because there is no way to specify when this gets printed,
> how the page header, footer look like. e.g. it's not possible to
> have a front page with only title of document and author, date,
> centered in the page.  I have to copy content from wiki into
> OpenOffice and format it there.

Well, the wiki has to provide proper hooks, providing these things
automatically.

> The convention I used "tikiwiki" only have a few "syntax" for
> different formats, I think less than a dozen.  Compare to what ms
> package offers, it was just too few.

I think we are miscommunicating.  Let's assume this wiki text:

  == header text ==

  body text

This might be converted by to groff like this:

  .NH 2
  header text
  .PP
  body text

Where's the problem?  A proper wiki2troff converter should do this
easily (ideally implemented as a part of the wiki engine).

> However there is a strong need of using wiki for project document
> because in an agile development process the software document can be
> changed anytime by anyone.  and frequently a well formated version
> is needed for print-output for commercial releases.  Can we have
> roff's richness in formatting and layout text on paper, providing
> high quality print output for the product delivery, while provide
> high flexibility and co-operation of wiki, without forcing document
> writers (often not developers) to use a version control software and
> collaborate by committing instead of just work on the web pages?

Of course.  Just provide a wiki2troff script.  However, I can't
believe that tikiwiki hasn't something similar, probably directly
creating PS output (or converting to TeX).

> I know right-to-left language is not supported. Chinese neither, for
> the line-break issue.  By the way, why being old is a reason to
> being in-active for new feature requirements (e.g. right-to-left)?

At the time of writing groff the author hasn't thought of supporting
those scripts.  It's difficult to extend the internal structures
without rewriting it completely.  I lack time to do even the simplest
things with groff currently, and no other people work on those groff
internals actively.


    Werner