Re: [Groff] Colours & smart quotes

[Larry Kollar]

Stewart C. Russell wrote:

>Long answer: In the last few years, we developed our own home-brew
>system for typesetting dictionaries. It's a fairly elegant PostScript
>macro processor (and before you ask, no, you can't have it).

Sounds a little... specialized.



>There are a couple of commercial packages that look capable of large
>dictionary typesetting; FrameMaker, which has many powerful features
>hidden away and a fairly stiff [...] price tag.

I use FrameMaker in my day job, on MacOS. AppleScript support
is the icing on the cake (my latest effort extracts terms &
definitions from the chapters and creates a sorted glossary --
very convenient). If you're doing anything complex with the
SGML component, you'll either need to train up an expert or
hire one. Adobe's support is dodgy, but there are two good
mailing lists with plenty of knowledgeable people.



>We looked at TeX too, but it's just too huge and difficult to customise.
>Font installation under TeX is demented, even with all the things that
>are supposed to make it easy.

I believe that Knuth wrote TeX as an elaborate joke. I'm told
he has a wicked sense of humor. But in this case, the joke got
away from him.



>So there's groff, [...]
>Of course, it has its limitations -- it doesn't do vertical
>justification or column balancing out the box, widow and orphan
>control can only be crudely fudged with .ne

I'd meant to ask if anyone had worked up a solution to orphans.
My first thought was that it could be done by diverting each
paragraph & acting on the vertical size of the diversion. It's
a brute-force solution, but could be made to work. A similar
approach would work for vertical fill.



>Of course, the biggest problem with groff is best explained with this:
>
>echo 'Ab Qbpf' |\
>[...]
>
>But we can work on that ;-)

Actually, there's plenty of "Qbpf" out there -- between the
groff.texinfo manual, the Groff & Friends HOWTO, and the
historic AT&T documentation, it's mostly covered. The problem
is, "someone" needs to collect & organize it all, and perhaps
fill in a few missing pieces. As a single manual, it would be
intimidating -- I estimate over 500 pages. My mental outline
consists of two documents: a user guide (covering the standard
macro packages) and a macro hacker's reference.

Speaking as a technical writer, the other big problem with groff
is that the public macro packages were around when the Sphinx
still had a nose. :-) We've learned a lot since then, and have
gained important electronic publishing avenues such as XML,
HTML, and PDF as well. I've actually started a prototype of a
"-modern" macro package; so far it consists of about 50 lines
of macro code on top of -ms. Some of the design goals are to
support cross-references, put the table of contents up front
where it belongs, build screen-oriented PDFs, and easy trans-
lation to HTML or possibly Docbook. (Grohtml is a brilliant
piece of work, but I'm a near-purist.) I'll make it available
when I have more of it working.

        Larry