Re: [Groff] Regarding HTML rendering

[Peter Schaffter]

On Wed, Aug 16, 2017, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Peter Schaffter wrote on Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 01:37:17PM -0400:
> > On Wed, Aug 16, 2017, Mikkel wrote:
> 
> >> I can see that nobody has replied. Pleas don't worry about it. It's not
> >> anything critical to me it's just sometimes nice to have a little input
> >> from others. I think that tbl is the route go for me. But don't worry about
> >> giving an answer unless you feel inspired to do so :-). Greetings Mikkel
> 
> > I suspect the reason no one replied is that grohtml hasn't been
> > actively developed for a while.  It isn't being widely used.
> 
> Besides, it's a hard task allowing moderate success at best.  The
> roff language is a poor fit for what HTML excels in, namely,
> hierarchical representation of information and semantic markup.
> The HTML language is a poor fit for what groff excels in, namely,
> exact positioning of glyphs and lines on paper.

Well said.

> So technically, the best way to transform groff_mom(7) documents
> into HTML would be to parse a high-level MOM node tree and convert
> that directly to HTML, without going through troff(1) at all, like
> mandoc(1) does it for the mdoc(7) language.

Precisely.

> But i'm not aware that anybody did the work of writing a semantic
> MOM parser yet.

Not to my knowledge, either.  It wouldn't be too much of a challenge.
I've done it myself ad hoc with nothing more than sed(1).  The mom
macros were designed to make semantic parsing easy.

-- 
Peter Schaffter
http://www.schaffter.ca