Re: [Groff] OT: PubCSS: Library of CSS and HTML for Academic PDF and HTML.

[Larry Kollar]

> Ralph Corderoy <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Thought this might be of interest to some of the list, despite involving
> XML!
> 
>    https://github.com/thomaspark/pubcss/#readme
> 
>    PubCSS is a library of CSS stylesheets and HTML templates for formatting
>    academic publications for print and the web.
> 
>    ...
> 
> Using Prince, which turns HTML and CSS into PDF, it produces
> https://github.com/thomaspark/pubcss/blob/master/formats/acm-sig/templates/acm-sig-sample-latex.pdf?raw=true
> with the option of formatting in a similar style for a web presentation
> of the paper, i.e.
> http://thomaspark.me/project/pubcss/demo/acm-sig-sample-web.html
> The author goes on to mention how the web one can be tarted up and made
> more interactive, currently with Javascript, but with CSS as better
> browser support arrives.

Prince is commercial software, with a rather (yes, I’m going there) princely 
price attached. :-P Free for non-commercial use, although an academic server 
version is in the $2000 range.

Of course, one could write an XSLT stylesheet to translate the template-d HTML 
to groff and generate a PDF. I’m doing exactly that for our publishing co-op, 
extracting HTML from eBooks that use our house CSS and running it through *roff 
to produce PDF. (I’m using neatroff at the moment, as it can do paragraph-level 
formatting.) Currently, manual intervention is a matter of converting images 
where needed and fiddling with line spacing to even up bottom margins. I wonder 
if I could divert an entire page and do that automatically, it could save a 
bunch of time…

— Larry