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[Groff] Re: tag tidying up..

From: Larry Kollar
Subject: [Groff] Re: tag tidying up..
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 19:54:41 -0500 

Gaius Mulley wrote:


... It looks like the </p><p> combination is
causing larger spacing - on .TP requests 2..n. Maybe grohtml should
use <br><br> inside tables to represent a troff .sp?
I'll investigate..
I would like to (again) suggest using CSS instead of tables to specify indents. For .TP (or .IP in -ms), the input & HTML output could look something like this: 

        .TP 5
        natter
        fiddle dee dee
        .TP
        gromish
        signifying nothing

        <head>
        <style>
        P { margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 0 }
        </style>
        <body>
        <p>natter</p>
        <div style="margin-left:5ex; margin-top:0">fiddle dee dee</div>
        <p>gromish</p>
        <div style="margin-left:5ex ; margin-top:0">signifying nothing</div>

The same scheme would work in -ms for .IP "string" styled lists.

The optimal output would use <dl>:

        <dl>
        <dt>natter</dt>
        <dd>fiddle dee dee</dd>
        <dt>gromish</dt>
        <dd>signifying nothing</dd>
        </dl>
But detecting the beginning and ending of the lists would be difficult, unless you assume that the first .TP (or .IP) begins a definition list and the first non-TP paragraph marks its end. Maybe some list-specific tags could be created that could provide the intelligence needed. It would really be nice if grohtml could recognize common constructs like ".IP \[bu]" or ".IP \n+[LC1]" and automatically create bulleted/numbered lists, although the .ULS/.LI/.ULE macros provide a good workaround for bulleted lists.
General indents using .in or .RS/.RE could be expressed using <div style="margin-left:5ex>...</div> sections, specifying an appropriate indentation. The "ex" (x-height) unit is the closest CSS unit to *roff's "n" unit; likewise, CSS's "px" and *roff's "p" are essentially identical. 

This is getting long and probably confusing, so I'll stop for questions.
--
Larry Kollar     k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival"
http://home.alltel.net/kollar/utp/
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