Re: [Groff] Re: Simplifying groff documentation

[Larry Kollar]

Michael(tm) Smith wrote:

> There is a alternative open-source DocBook-to-PDF/Postscript
> option that already produces better output than FOP in many cases.
> It's db2latex:
>
>   http://db2latex.sourceforge.net/
>
> It doesn't use XSL-FO at all. Instead it translates DocBook to
> LaTeX and then uses TeX to generate output from that. I think that
> approach is suboptimal; it'd be a lot better to have a good
> open-source XSL-FO engine.

I'm not sure why. FO is sort of a "roach hotel" language in
an XML sense -- once you have FO, you're not going to
transform it to any other XML markup. Besides, there are
other forms of markup -- namely, *roff and *TeX -- that
already do a great job of typesetting and are Free. Why
not replace FO with one or the other? It's computationally
a similar step and you don't have to wait for FOP or xmlroff
to get up to snuff.

I've asked this question before on XML fora and have not
heard a satisfactory answer.

--
Larry Kollar     k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival"
http://unixtext.org/