Hi, David and Sano,
On Sat, Apr 14, 2007 at 02:07:45PM -0700, David Lawyer wrote:
> Package: linuxdoc-tools
> Version 0.9.21-0.5
>
> Please merge bug 175575 into this bug report since it's a subset of
> the bug (and proposed fix) I'm now reporting.
>
> When I use sgml2txt I get both escape sequences and overstrikes which
> plain text output shouldn't normally have. There is an -f option to
> sgml2txt to eliminate the overstrikes.
which by the way is buggy, and quite often does not remove all escapes,
> It very important to keep the
> use of sgml2txt as simple as possible since the main advantage of
> linuxdoc format over docbook is that it's simple and using the
> linuxdoc-tools should also be simple. The escape sequences are only
> for vt100 terminals (and the like) and will not display if one uses an
> editor (like vim) or pager (like less or most) to read the file.
> Overstrikes don't usually get displayed right either although some
> pagers can deal with them for some cases (such as underline).
>
> So the default for conversion to text should (in my opinion) be just
> plain text.
>
> The documentation for linuxdoc-tools fails to explain how to get
> various types of text outputs using sgml2txt. It should. The way to
> get plain text is to pass options to the grotty program from the sgml2txt
> command line. Like this: sgml2txt --pass="-P-bcou". See "man grotty"
> for how these 4 options (bcou) work together. To make this the
> default, one could modify: /usr/share/linuxdoc-tools/dist/fmt_txt.pl
> For example, this seems to work although I've never studied Perl:
>
> create_temp("$global->{tmpbase}.txt.1");
> #next line added by DL (David Lawyer)
> $global->{pass} = "-P-cbou" if $global->{pass} eq "";
> $outfile = new FileHandle
> "|$main::progs->{GROFF} $global->{pass} -T $global->{charset} -t
> $main::progs->{GROFFMACRO} >\"$global->{tmpbase}.txt.1\"";
Based on your proposed fix, I think something like in this diff
----------------------------------------------------------------
@@ -329,6 +323,7 @@
{
my $infile = shift;
my ($outfile, $groffout);
+ my $txtfilter = $txt->{filter} ? "-P-cbou" : "";
if ($txt->{manpage})
{
@@ -338,7 +333,7 @@
{
create_temp("$global->{tmpbase}.txt.1");
$outfile = new FileHandle
- "|$main::progs->{GROFF} $global->{pass} -T $global->{charset} -t
$main::progs->{GROFFMACRO} >\"$global->{tmpbase}.txt.1\"";
+ "|$main::progs->{GROFF} $global->{pass} $txtfilter -T
$global->{charset} -t $main::progs->{GROFFMACRO} >\"$global->{tmpbase}.txt.1\"";
}
#
------------------------------------------------------------------
can be used to make the -f option work as expected.
I am generally not in favour of changing long-standing behaviors. However,
in this case, escaped characters are of so limited use that might worth
considering that.
I think a middle point is possible, making -f default for sgml2txt, but not
for linuxdoc -B txt. This way, escaped chars can easily be obtained if
really required (directly calling linuxdoc without the -f option), but plain
text is obtained from calls to sgml2txt (that would be trivial to
implement), with no option for the opposite behavior here. If we are flamed
for this, we could reconsider the change. What do you think?
> Instead of hard-coding -cbou options into the code as I've done above,
> one could create a new variable, GROTTYOPTS, and set it equal to -cbou
> in the main program: /usr/share/linuxdoc-tools/LinuxDocTools.pm. I'm
> willing to do some more work on this and create patches (I've never
> done Linux patches before) provided of course that it's agreed that
> sgml2txt should generate plain text by default.
I am relatively new to perl, and far from being a perl guru. I might be
missing a lot of important things here, but linuxdoc-tools perl seems to me
extremely ancient, and there are a lot of things I do not understand why are
done that way. As a matter of fact I am changing some things to what is
IMHO more readable, and found no drawbacks yet.
I mean that is probably not the kind of perl a new person will enjoy, but
you are of course welcome.
As I mentioned elsewhere, although I am not the maintainer of this package,
I plan to keep improving it when possible, so I am happy to receive your
feedback through the Debian BTS.
Thanks for your help and suggestions,
--
Agustin
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