> > *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 <jklow...@schemamania.org> wrote: > On Mon, 16 Apr 2018 13:19:31 -0500 > Nate Bargmann <n...@n0nb.us> 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 > >