Re: <OK> [Groff] Simplifying groff documentation

[Gunnar Ritter]

"Michael(tm) Smith" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Gunnar Ritter <address@hidden>, 2007-01-03 18:30 +0100:
> > The other side is that it is much easier to convert DocBook
> > to troff directly.
> True. And people familiar with LaTex and ConTeXt find it much
> easier to convert DocBook to those formats directly. It makes
> great sense if DocBook is the only XML vocabulary the community
> wants to be able to generate print/PDF output. It starts to look a
> lot less appealing as more XML vocabularies enter the picture.

As a troff user, my preference would actually be to have
a collection of XSLT stylesheets, one for each of the
supported XML input languages, and to have a common troff
macro set to which all of these are transformed. This is
because I am interested to use troff as the layout mechanism,
i.e. as the language in which I specify the visual markup
aspects. If troff just hides behind XSL-FO, it becomes nearly
invisible, and there would be no special reason to prefer
XSL-FO-troff to any other XSL-FO engine.

For most elements, the stylesheet would actually be quite
simple; for example, it could just convert <blockquote> to
.Blockquote. (Another stylesheet could convert a similar
non-DocBook element to the same troff macro call.)

For doing anything which is not representable in the input
language, one could use <?troff .xx?>.

The macro set could then be customizable as usual, e.g.
it would be possible to specify the page layout with troff
statements. Courageous users could also replace some or all
of the macros by their own.

For some uses, the generated troff code could also be edited
directly instead of the source document. This is what I already
do with my OpenDocument-to-troff converter - no sane person
would want to edit OpenDocument manually in order to create
a book. In such cases, it is not even necessary that the XSLT
stylesheet covers the complete input language.

This is, at least, my perspective for a troff typographer
in a world where authoring is done in XML languages.

> I would personally love to see a direct DocBook-to-troff
> converter. But I'm a DocBook user. If I were a TEI user, I'd
> probably be a lot less keen on the idea of somebody putting time
> into making a print processor that only works for DocBook.

DocBook is most important for the kind of books which have
been published using troff so far, so it would certainly be
the appropriate place to start.

        Gunnar