Re: [Groff] RE: Simplifying groff documentation

[Michael(tm) Smith]

Ted Harding <address@hidden>, 2006-12-23 00:48 -0000:

> Therefore my case for groff would not rest on man-pages. Indeed,
> if groff were superseded by something else for man-pages I would
> maintain that this would not diminsh the usefulness of groff,
> nor the necessity to keep it going.
> 
> On the other hand, there is a "mind-set" amongst some that the
> purpose of groff is to format man-pages, and to such people a
> change to something else for man-pages could mean that there was
> no longer any case for groff in a Linux/Unix distribution (except
> for those weirdos who really want it).
> 
> I'm personally not that interested in "groff for man-pages" as
> such (though I think that it's as good as anything else so it
> might as well be used), in that I would not favour the intrinsic
> functionality of groff being vulnerable to the demands of man-page
> formatting. Let groff develop as a real typesetting engine in its
> own right, for the production of documents of all kinds, and let
> 'man' take what it can from what groff has to offer.

For what it's worth, I just wanted to chime in and say that I
agree with those sentiments. I'm not a real groff user myself, but
it seems clear that the place where groff truly shines is in
producing quality typeset output. I guess it's unique in that it
can by itself produce output for console viewing from the same
source it can generate nicely typeset Postscript output from. But
there are lots of other ways to make output for console viewing.

I don't think most people creating man pages author the source in
groff because they know much about groff. I would guess that the
for the vast majority of man-page authors, their knowledge of
groff is limited to just whatever they need to get their
particular man pages to display the way they intend. I think if
many of them had a solution to generating man-page output that
didn't require them to author their source directly in groff,
they'd probably use it. And that would be not slight against
groff.

  --Mike