Re: Readability of troff documents (Was: [Groff] Bug in gxditview)

[Alejandro Lopez-Valencia]

At 12:41 a.m. 23/05/2003, Giorgos Magos wrote:
> Is there a way (other than preprocessing through some sed
> filter) of inserting these the way they're inserted in
> LaTeX?

Besides the sed (or awk) way, there are other alternatives.

1.  If you are in control of your editor, you can use a mechanism to map 
key-codes to groff char-codes. See for example the attached keymap files 
for vim. You need a vim compiled with the +keymap feature. This approach 
has its disadvantages, namely, you need that the particular character be 
assigned a key-code! (Thusly, you still need to type \[em] or use sed...). 
But this cold be worked around using a language map (+langmap feature). I 
haven't explored this possibiity though. (B. Moolenaar, vim's BDFL, 
considers this a thorough perversion of the original purpose, btw). I am 
sure you can do the same with a Mule enabled Emacs (and lots of coding ;-).

2.  Use the right language for the job. Python allows you to write special 
purpose codecs that don't necessarily have to be actual computer codepages 
nor character vector encodings. Soo... You can write the web application 
code you give as an example of (very practical and contemporaneous uses of 
troff) in some Python web-application framework (there are several each 
appealing to different audiences) and use an special purpose codec to 
decode your input text into groff source on-the-fly. I haven't tried this 
yet, but to my taste this beats hands-down writing sed scripts :-)

groff_keymap.zip
Description: Zip archive