Re: [Groff] Mission statement, 3rd draft

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Peter,

> Filtered through a simple sed script, the resulting mom file preserves
> all of the semantics, has *no* low-level groff requests, and requires
> exactly 4 trivial tweaks (to satisfy my personal aesthetics).

OOI, do you code those tweaks as sed?

> [heading 2] "Manpages"
> 
>     The need for Unix manuals to render cleanly to multiple output
> media favours structural rather than presentational markup, however
> the classical [manpage]man[manpage](7) macros remain almost
> exclusively presentational.  [manpage]mdoc[manpage](7) provides a
> semantically superior alternative, but the use of
> [manpage]man[manpage](7) is deeply rooted in GNU-based systems.

Seems odd to mention GNU here;  they've done more damage to man pages
with insistence on info(1) than anyone else.  Are you thinking of "you
must call it GNU/Linux"?  I think that should be "Unix-based systems".

> The aim will be to ease conversion of manpages to markup languages
> that do not rely on groff for display and printing, e.g. xml

Not "XML"?

Cheers, Ralph.