Dnia wtorek, 25 maja 2010 o 17:37:27 Werner LEMBERG napisał(a): > > Now to the output of -Thtml: [...] > > You've hit one of the weakest points of groff...
It is also (potentially) the most used point nowadays, as GUI systems prefer to display manual pages in HTML: PostScript is too heavy and the X display, while most accurate, does not allow to search or copy text. This is not a problem for small pages; however, for pages like groff_mdoc.n it is overwhelming (no page references in ToC, no concept index, no keyword index). > > Unfortunately, the author of grohtml no longer takes care of his > `baby', and I don't have time either to work on it. For this reason > grohtml is still tagged as `beta code'. After giving this problem a second thought, I think grohtml is a misconception. It is an attempt to reconstruct a high-level semantic description (HTML) from a low-level graphic description (groff output). This plan is bound to fail. OTOH, I think it would be possible to modify existing mdoc sources to produce semantic HTML directly via write or preferably via device-specific output instructions; however, I am not familiar with groff output format so I cannot tell whether that would be fully possible, but I know one thing for sure: groff has no way to predict the font metrics in the browser that displays the result so the output must be high-level to be predictable. And I envision a construct-by-construct transformation to XML as a valuable intermediate step: construct-by-construct is easy and XML-to-HTML is easy. Please forgive me if these ramblings show only my complete lack of understanding of the internal mechanisms of groff; it is a large and complicated engine and I would obviously need a couple of weeks to understand how it works. > > Additionally, the mdoc package has, contrary to ms or man, not been > prepared for proper grohtml support yet. On the other hand, there are > still some bugs directly in grohtml. > > In case you are interested in the latter, it would be of great help if > you can construct minimal documents which exhibit erroneous behaviour, > and submit them as individual bug reports to Savannah so that at least > the problems get collected at a central place. Submitting patches of > course is highly welcomed too (for example, to check the HTML stuff in > `s.tmac' or `an-old.tmac' and do something similar in `doc.tmac' and > its related files). I think the bundled BUGS document should mention the Savannah URL. Cheers, Chris _______________________________________________ bug-groff mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-groff
