Fwd: [Groff] Re: begin page blues

[Larry Kollar]

(Sorry Peter, I meant to send that to the group...)

> > > When I was a youngster (yes!), device independence
> > > and pre- and post-processors were good ideas and necessary.  I
> > > wonder whether it still is the case.
> >
> > For me: definitely yes.
>
> I concur.

Yes. You have PS/PDF and plain text (usually for man pages),
but there's also a need for HTML (which grohtml handles). Groff
gives the best of both worlds -- the flexibility of adding whatever
front-ends and back-ends are needed, but mostly hiding it all
behind the "groff" command.

> This sounds very much like the idea that was fielded a while ago,
> namely a WYSIWYG-style front-end that generated groff-formatted
> source documents.  ....
> I suspect groff would benefit from something like
> this--a sort of LyX for groff. ...
>
> However, I noticed that the idea died.  Not sure if it was for lack
> of interest, or lack of skills and time in the development
> community.

A combination, perhaps. I've played around with LyX, and I
believe it is possible to write an exporter that would produce
some flavor of groff -- the problem there is, what flavor do you
pick? Do you aim for a vanilla macro set, add extensions, or
strike off on your own? Once you make a choice that equally
dissatisfies everyone, actually writing the exporter should be
trivial by comparison. :-)

> > No chance.  Youngster don't use groff at all.  It's way too uncool,
> > isn't it? :-)
>
> Actually, I'm finding the opposite.  I've been asked to give a talk
> about groff and the mom macro set to the Ottawa/Canada Linux Users
> Group, which is composed mostly of "youngsters".  Conversely, I've
> noticed that it's people in their forties and fifties, accustomed to
> word processing, who think the whole text processing philosophy and
> implementation isn't sufficiently cool for their tastes.

Hm. I'm 47, but I've spent the last 20-odd (and I do mean odd)
years doing technical writing. I'm actually getting fed up with
FrameMaker's limitations (and it's pretty much the best of the
WYSIWYG lot) & have started porting one manual I'm working
on to groff. If the translators don't have a coronary when they
see the source files, I'll do more.

--
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/