Re: [groff] Creating a numbered list without macros

[Yves Cloutier]

My friends, my intention was not to "stir the pot" so to speak.

All your points are well taken.

Using  mom as a backend is something I have already done. A few tears ago I
worked very closely under Peter's guidance.  (we happen to live in the same
city). It also allowed the user to add in pure groff where additional fine
tuning was needed.  It was a 1:1 feature match with mom, only it provided,
a reduction of certain steps and a bit more intuitive in other things.

It can be found here:  https://github.com/cloutiy/tml

It worked quite well but mom has since evolved and so my original progrm
may no longer work. I had done it using what I consider a quick but "poor"
implementation approach which was a pain to maintain and had been wanting
to reboot the project from scratch using  saner approach.

Again, my intention was simply to *try* to try something different and
experiment with ideas I had floating around.  That's all.

All your points are well taken and worth consideration.

Thanks



On Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 5:04 AM Ralph Corderoy <address@hidden>
wrote:

> Hi Ingo,
>
> > > He may not know himself at this be largely based on indentation, for
> > > example.
> >
> > That has been tried, with very poor results:
> >
> >   https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170304230520
>
> No, Markdown is far more complex that what I was suggesting.  The main
> content of a novel needs to start a chapter and have paragraphs, and
> Roman and italic text.  No indexing, footnotes would be unusual, no
> lists, etc.
>
> > and actually *harder* as soon as the task at hand becomes even mildly
> > non-trivial.
>
> As I've already said: we don't know, the task may be trivial.
>
> > learning to read and write a natural language is many orders of
> > magnitudes harder than something as simple as HTML or roff macros.
>
> Not necessarily.  Plenty can write poorly, but still be understood by
> another human reader.  Computers tend to want everything perfect; DWIM
> is a bad idea.  Some folks just can't be sufficiently precise.
>
> There's no point being prescriptive about what Yves should do.  Yes,
> -mom would be a good back-end for him to target rather than pure troff.
> If he's doing an MVP then he's finding out his audience and will better
> understand their needs by putting something in front of them he can
> constantly tinker and tailor before throwing it away.  It may be that
> presenting the troff syntax of -mom has the majority stop there because
> it's too much of a culture shock.
>
> --
> Cheers, Ralph.
> https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy
>

typesetting-markup-language-manual v0.1.7.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document