Re: [Groff] Typesetting Markup Language (TML) - a Superset of Groff

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

"James K. Lowden" <address@hidden> wrote:
 |On Sat, 16 Jan 2016 17:32:38 +0100
 |Steffen Nurpmeso <address@hidden> wrote:
 |> I think plain SGML is still an interesting language, much
 |> better than what XML made of it.  
 |
 |As Dijkstra said of Algol, "an improvement over many of its
 |successors."  
 |
 |> I had a time when i liked rst, but pimping POD is possibly nicer
 |> given how rst looks if you start real work with progamming stuff
 |> etc.  And then a nicely reduced ROFF (TeX, too) set of macros does
 |> look very clean!
 |
 |I observe that my groff documents have the lowest markup/text ratio.
 |Less typing, more typesetting.  I suppose that's because, contrary to

Me too.  At least regarding letters or the like, in my own macro
package.  mdoc manuals are something different.

 |XML, troff syntax was always meant to be typed by the user.  
 |
 |My other observation is that all the new plaintext syntaxes run out of
 |gas before you get very far.  Try representing a table in markdown;
 |look for a way to do footnotes.  

That is, or was, my one, too.  I don't think i ever tried _that_,
though i tried to use it for documenting programs, and the text
became so full of special markup characters that the term "plain
text format" could no longer have been applied to it, and using
the result as a README for a normal end-user would not have been
a real option no more.

The good think on those new format is that someone has written
converters that can be used to produce output in a lot of formats,
and very often in good quality.  It would be nice if that would
happen with roff in the future.

--steffen