Re: [Groff] Trouble with UTP...

[Jon Snader]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2002 at 02:14:17PM -0700, Meg McRoberts wrote:
> 
> 
> As for the "looking right," I'll check a lot of that as I edit these.  Did
> everyone get my edit comments for Chapter 5?  Many of those relate to how
> the macros are working.  I was kind of waiting to hear if that was the level
> of edit you want at this stage.
> 

Hi Meg,

Yes I did go over your comments, but I haven't had a chance to respond.
Almost all of the issues you raise are related to two things:

        1) The HTML output doesn't look right
        2) There is some infelicity in the typesetting for the PostScript.

As far as 1) is concerned, I didn't give any thought at all to the behavior
of the UTP macros under HTML.  As I understand it, the HTML capability is
still evolving under groff and is not yet considered ready for production
work.  I can't imagine, for instance, the the SS/SE macros or X[1-4] macros
would work correctly for HTML.  That's not to say we can't fix those things,
only that there hasn't been any attention paid to the effort yet.

The Ah macro should (I would have thought) produce reasonable output, but
actually generates code that is trying to download a PNG image.  I suggest
that we do the following: Let's get all the wrinkles wrung out of the
PostScript and then see what adjustments might be needed for the HTML.
Since I've never experimented with it, this could take some time and help
from others on the list.

Most of the PostScript errors that you describe do not involve the UTP
macros at all--they are the result of ms macros.  As I'm sure you know,
it's hard work to get a book looking good with any typesetting system,
especially one that uses a markup language like troff or TeX.  On the
other hand, when done well, the results far outshine things like Framemaker
or, God forbid, Word.  As far as I can see the PostScript errors you
describe are mostly the result of small input errors when the text was
being marked up.  They should be easy to fix.

Jon Snader