Re: [Groff] Groff editor.

[brian m. carlson]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 12:29:08PM -0700, Meg McRoberts wrote:
> I am rapidly getting in over my head here, but one thought is that,
> since Eric Raymond's groff-to-xml converter is open source, it wouldn't
> be too tough to make a version that then converts XML back to groff.
> You might be able to modify the source to eliminate any coding that is
> not converting well so that it's a clean conversion in both directions.

This is non-trivial.  I've tried to do it using XSLT[0], and produced a
really nasty set of output that only a computer could love.  I'm also
trying to do it with a program that I've written called thwack[1], which
will convert between formats such as troff and XSL-FO.  I have some
questions about groff compatibility which I might ask later.

The only difference which might make this task easier is that doclifter
(ESR's program) and the hypothetical XML-to-groff converter use things
that are more semantically meaningful; for example, paragraphs instead
of indentations.

No need to CC, thanks.  I'm subscribed.

bmc

[0] 
http://crustytoothpaste.ath.cx/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=bmc/repo/xsl-sheets.git;a=blob;f=fo/fo2troff.xsl;h=c6ef9b0002bd9e551ca339a0dd88d24618eb822f;hb=HEAD
[1] http://crustytoothpaste.ath.cx/~bmc/code/projects#thwack

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brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US
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