Re: [groff] groff as the basis for comprehensive documentation?

[John Gardner]

>
> *Groff is not the ideal system for generating HTML.*


It's easier than you think.You just have to separate presentational
semantics from structural and content-related ones.

Personally, I feel HTML generators should emit only semantic markup and
leave it to structure and external stylesheets to take care of the rest.


> You might like to believe that eqn, tbl, and pic could be processed with
> grohtml


I've seen grohtml's complexity and was bewildered.  Hence why I intend to
write my own. The procedures for inferring structural or semantic metadata
from low-level intermediate output commands will be an entertaining
challenge. =)


On 20 April 2018 at 00:45, James K. Lowden <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Mon, 16 Apr 2018 13:19:31 -0500
> Nate Bargmann <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > I'm still undecided on the Texinfo part, though it may serve as the
> > portion that ties everything together.  I have man pages for utility
> > programs of the project and will be writing man pages for the C
> > library.  Being able to collate this nicely would be a great
> > benefit.
>
> I went down your very same road some years ago, except I used jade and
> SGML instead of XML for DocBook.  I found LaTex too confining and
> complex.  Once I bothered to learn mdoc, I wished I'd started there.
>
> The roff language is the only markup language in current use that was
>
>         1.  designed to be typed by humans, and
>         2.  designed to produce typeset documentation.
>
> I think there was hope, once upon a time, that a free implementation of
> something like Interleaf would become the UI for DocBook, and that mere
> mortals wouldn't have to balance their tags.  Needless to say, it never
> came to pass.  Lyx isn't it.
>
> The design of the roff language, while not "modern", is minimalistic;
> it has the least markup as a percentage of text.  It makes few
> assumptions about how the text should appear, and those assumption are
> well documented and easily adjusted.  The groff implementation is fast
> and small.  As Hoare said of Algol, it is an improvement over its
> successors.
>
> The full current capability of groff is harder to exploit than it could
> be, however.  There's still a bias toward printed output.  To create a
> document like Deri's, with hyperlinks, you have to understand the
> system pretty well, and piece together a few documents, some of which
> are incomplete.  Cross references in mdoc, for example, do not generate
> links in HTML or PDF documents.  It's possible to produce presentation
> slides, too, but you have to do a little digging.
>
> > Ideally, if the same sort of collation could be done with HTML, that
> > would be perfect.
>
> Groff is not the ideal system for generating HTML.  You might like to
> believe that eqn, tbl, and pic could be processed with grohtml and come
> out lovely on the other side, but that goal remains over the horizon.
> It's pretty rare just to find manpages rendered in proportional HTML
> fonts.
>
> --jkl
>
>