Re: [Groff] Regarding HTML rendering

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Steve,

Steve Izma wrote on Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 04:52:56PM -0400:

> A relatively simple notation like Markdown would also work,

I agree with all you are saying except this.

The OP is certainly better off writing his documents in proper
roff(7) or groff_mom(7) and living with slighly quirky HTML output
than writing his documents in markdown and getting crappy output
quality in *all* output formats.  Converting markdown into acceptable
roff input is just not feasible - not only because there is no tool
to do it, but also because markdown is just not powerful enough,
even if you were willing to write a new program to do that.

Besides, i hate the myth being re-iterated that markdown would be
easy to use.  It is an extremely hostile, hard-to-use language
because it doesn't have any kind of consistent syntax, but instead
three strongly conflicting ones, so the rules for what any given
input means are usually extremely complicated and counter-intuitive,
and besides, there is almost no markdown document that is portable
because the details of all three syntaxes differ from one implementation
to the other, and there is no lack of conflicting implementations.

For details why you should never use or recommend markdown as a
source language for any documents, see

  http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170304230520

Yours,
  Ingo