Re: Future of groff Texinfo manual (was: documentation of hyphenation)

[John Gardner]

Well said, James. Fully agreed on all points.

> A convenient GUI viewer -- with hyperlinks and proportional fonts --
> would "advertise" groff and cement its position as the best free
> documenation system there is, bar none.

I started work on such a thing. Basically, it's an Electron-based front-end
for Roff.js <https://github.com/Alhadis/Roff.js> to enable live-reloading
of edited Roff documents, hyperlinked cross-references (both in nroff(1)
and troff(1)-emulated output), and a bunch of other spiffy-looking crap
like translucency and mupdf-style page-navigation.

It was designed to be eye candy for people who don't read man pages because
they're "ugly" and "outdated". People might think differently if they see
high-quality typeset manuals instead of 4-font monospaced TTY output… :-)

On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 at 23:54, James K. Lowden <jklowden@schemamania.org>
wrote:

> On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 03:08:04 +1000
> "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > At 2020-06-14T14:40:44+1000, John Gardner wrote:
> > > Why are we using Info, again? Was it because of GNU policy?
> >
> > Yes.  https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#GNU-Manuals
> >
> > Aside from the mandate of the source document format, I find the
> > advice there fairly sound, as far as it goes.
>
> I don't think the "mandate" has any force.  What are they going to do,
> kick us out?
>
> I suggest we drop texinfo when the same output can be produced with
> groff.  That means HTML and, if you ask me, a better viewer than GNU
> less(1).
>
> Texinfo was invented to replace man pages.  groff was invented to
> (among other things) preserve them.  I guess we could call that
> "philosophical tension".
>
> Of the two, I'd say groff has been far more successful, whether you
> count documents or pages or users.
>
> (Strangely enough, my Ubuntu system lacks a texinfo file for texinfo.
> "info texinfo" turns up a ... man page.)
>
> The in-terminal experience of info files is about as bad as it gets.
> The info reader's sole strength is links, especially index links.  The
> UI is otherwise hideous.  I don't think there's a better word for it.
>
> texinfo is therefore -- even in that document's own estimation -- best
> treated as a source format, as a markup language.  On that basis, how is
> it superior to groff?
>
> texinfo produces better HTML.  Unlike man and mdoc, texinfo has
> hyperlinks and floating displays.  groff has the advantage at the
> command line, which is why (I suppose) bash dropped info in favor of a
> man page.
>
> For our purposes, texinfo will be obsolete the day groff documentation
> in HTML is of similar quality to that produced by texinfo.  IMHO, GNU
> has no reason to object, given groff's inherent purpose as a project.
>
> Beyond that, I have long thought that, as a matter of perception and
> acceptance, the one thing holding groff back is how man pages are
> typically viewed, i.e., though nroff and the pager.  Nothing says 1980
> like a monospaced font on a VT-100, where the mouse becomes inert and
> cross references have to be typed in.
>
> There is no GUI application specialized for viewing man pages.  There
> is ditroff and xman; there are PDF viewers and web browsers.  But
> there's nothing so quick as "man foo" to bring up a man page.  That's
> why man(1) has endured, and why decades-long efforts to replace it
> have failed.
>
> A convenient GUI viewer -- with hyperlinks and proportional fonts --
> would "advertise" groff and cement its position as the best free
> documenation system there is, bar none.
>
> --jkl
>
>
>
>