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