Re: [Groff] Eric Raymond on groff and TeX

[Pierre-Jean]

Steve Izma <address@hidden> wrote:

> I've made a lot of notes about this, and I promise that soon I
> will try to document this and other issues that make XML to groff
> processing tricky.

Most of us would like to read this, it's a very intersting
issue about troff. Please, inform the list when you've got a
draft of this document.

> That's exactly what you need to do, but it's not general-purpose
> because each project that has a different DTD would require
> rewriting the dictionary to include the inline tags for that DTD.
> As far as I know, there's no conventional way of flagging inline
> tags in DTDs or schemas. E.g., typical ways of tagging emphasis:
> <i>, <e1>, <italic>, <emphasis>, <emphasis type="bold">.

This problem is, in my opinion, true for all xml-to-print
software: you'll have to make typographical and layout
choices, you'll have to choose how to render each specific
tag, and this can't be done a priori for all the existing
xml schemas. Making a distinction between inline and block
elements is a little part of this work.

Furthermore, the fact that the distinction between inline
and block elements doesn't exist in xml is not only a
problem for troff, but for most of the printers. The CSS
style sheet *must* define if a tag is an inline or a block
element to render properly an xhtml page - we usually forget
this because most of the tags have a default definition.

Cheers,
Pierre-Jean.