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

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi James,

James K. Lowden wrote on Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 10:45:49AM -0400:

> The roff language is the only markup language in current use that was
[...]
> As Hoare said of Algol, it is an improvement over its successors.  

Heh.  That's a good one!

> Cross references in mdoc, for example, do not generate links in HTML

They do with mandoc(1) -Thtml.

> or PDF documents.

Right, that looks like a missing feature in both groff and mandoc.

> It's pretty rare just to find manpages rendered in proportional HTML
> fonts.  

Reading this, my first thought was "that can hardly be true any
longer", and indeed:

  https://man.openbsd.org/roff.7
  http://jlk.fjfi.cvut.cz/arch/manpages/man/core/groff/roff.7.en
  https://linux.die.net/man/7/roff

Then again, admittedly,

  https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/groff/roff.7.en.html
  https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=roff
  http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?roff
  https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=roff
  https://illumos.org/man/5/mandoc_roff
  http://man.minix3.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=man&sektion=7
  http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/roff.7.html

So yeah, even though proportional font is slowly becoming more
widely used, you may be right:  The legacy of Wolfram Schneider's
FreeBSD man.cgi is still pretty widespread and even motivated Michael
Stapelberg to use a fixed width font for Debian, even though the
rendering engine he uses would happily support proportional fonts.

Yours,
  Ingo