[Groff] groff developments - query about any interest?

[G Helffrich]

Dear All -

        Werner Lemberg suggested I contact the main list on this query.

        For my own need to turn scientific manuscripts into forms acceptable to 
scientific publishers (I still write papers in troff), I developed a couple of 
utilities. These might have broader use than just the need for which I 
developed them, and hence this query.

        Firstly, I hacked the eqn preprocessor so that it will translate 
equations into LaTeX math.  I use the unroff package (if you’re not familiar:  
http://www-rn.informatik.uni-bremen.de/software/unroff/ ) and developed a 
back-end to translate troff into LaTeX.  This hacked eqn processor is used to 
translate the equations and embed them into the LaTeX source which is produced.

        Now that proper mathematical typesetting has reached the web, it turns 
out that mathJAX will read a web page with LaTeX equations in it and render the 
equations in them via javascript run on modern browsers.  I use this tactic 
with the unroff HTML back-end. Hence, as an element in a toolchain to get eqn 
equations into various other forms (to LaTeX and to HTML) the utility might be 
useful as an independent part of groff.

        The second thing I developed is a utility to turn tbl tables into HTML 
tables.  It acts like the tbl filter and takes troff as input and produces HTML 
tags as output, so that the tables are rendered native in HTML.  I use this 
with an unroff back-end to convert my troff documents to HTML.  (It could also 
be extended to translate tbl tables into LaTeX tables, but I haven’t yet needed 
that.)

        Looking at the present groff, it seems that the HTML back-end turns pic 
pictures and equations into GIF or PNG images and drops them into the resulting 
HTML.  If these utilities were used, then the HTML translation would be much 
higher fidelity, with typeset math.  There appears to be partial support for 
HTML-rendered tables, but my translator goes beyond them.  It also appears that 
the HTML back-end could be extended to use SVG graphics.  That would put vector 
graphics into HTML and thus render all parts of troff documents on the Web with 
the fidelity associated with paper (or PDFs).  I use gs-based conversion tools 
(i.e. pdf2svg) with unroff’s HTML back-end to do this already for .PSPIC and 
pic pictures.

        If there is interest in these utilities, let me know how to contribute 
them to the present code base.  They date from groff release 1.11 so would need 
re-integration.

          George Helffrich

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