Re: [Groff] Typesetting Markup Language (TML) - a Superset of Groff

[Larry Kollar]

> Steve Izma <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Larry Kollar wrote:
>> Subject: Re: [Groff] Typesetting Markup Language (TML) - a Superset of Groff
>> 
>> ... Markdown, and most XML-based systems, deliberately
>> kick the formatting can down the road so you can focus on your content. The 
>> trick
>> is trusting the back-end will give you the output you need.
> 
> I strongly agree that formatting comes later, after you've worked
> out the structure and content of your document. And, as James
> Lowden says in a subsequent message, you should find a writing
> system that allows you to concentrate on writing and that creates
> the XML more-or-less automatically afterwards. I've found that,
> once the bulk of my writing is done in something like Markdown,
> that I can produce an XML document that is really not that hard
> to edit later on.

Often, I’ll start working in an outliner then export it to whatever tool
I’m using once I have the basics down. Simple DTDs like OPML are
essentials for that, because it’s easy to write an XSLT transform to
get it out of the outliner.

In fact, I’ve forked the long-dormant hnb outliner and (although I
hadn’t touched C in *years*) have found it easy to hack on to add
things I consider essential. One thing I got working over the weekend,
but haven’t pushed up to github yet, is an option to export all or part
of an outline to groff -ms (or Markdown). The outliner uses its own
ultra-simple XML DTD as its native format, and reads/writes OPML
without a hiccup; I plan to move it to OPML-native sooner or later.
Once I get the latest changes pushed up, I’ll post links.

> It helps to use a minimalist XML tag set, something like HTML5
> with the addition of a few tags related to the type of document
> you're working on. For a book, for example, I usually need tags
> for copyright information, tables of contents, footnotes, and a
> few other things.

Or you could use straight HTML with class attributes and (as you mentioned)
processing instructions. html2ps does that, using a subset of CSS to
specify formatting. If only it were a little more complete…

— Larry