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

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi James and Nate,

James K. Lowden wrote on Sat, Apr 21, 2018 at 06:58:59PM -0400:
> On Sat, 21 Apr 2018 08:16:36 -0500 Nate Bargmann wrote:

>> Note that I am only working with Groff's man macro package and do
>> understand that other macro packages may have greater demands on the
>> HTML generator.

> It's not the demands on the HTML *generator* that present the problem.
> The input to grohtml is devoid of information HTML itself demands, and
> is thick with information it can't use.  
> 
>       HTML needs: titles, paragraphs, tables
>       ditroff provides: positions, text, fonts
> 
> The only reason it works at all is that the pre-grohtml preprocessor
> sneaks some useful information to the postprocessor via ditroff
> escapes.  That allows grohtml to generate MathML from eqn output, for
> example.  
> 
> While it's possible to work that way, I see no advantage to squirting
> most of the needed information to the post-processor through the
> formatter, when the formatter's work is discarded by the
> post-processor.  Why bother?  just translate the macros directly.  
> 
> Which, I suppose, it what Ingo is doing already.  

Yes, confirmed, that is entirely accurate.  So the program
doing exactly that will be ten years old the coming winter.

It is also the reason why the former, original name of the mandoc
project, before it grew support for the man(7) input language
and the -Tascii, -Tutf8, -Tps, and -Tpdf output modes was
chosen as "mdocml" by the original author, Kristaps Dzonsons:
It meant "mdoc->html", i.e. "go directly from mdoc(7) to HTML,
without the devastating detour via the troff intermediate format".

Yours,
  Ingo