Re: [help-texinfo] Texinfo <-> roff?

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, Dec 03, 2016 at 11:25:56PM +0000, James Youngman wrote:
> 
> An obvious solution to this is to keep the overall structure of the two
> documents as-is, but to document the command-line options in just one
> place, and perform some kind of conversion.  For example I could cope with
> mastering documentation about command-line options in Texinfo and
> generating nroff (which I would concatenate into a manpage) or documenting
> the options in nroff and using that to generate part of the reference
> section of my Texinfo manual.

Given that objective, I think that you cannot really use something
generic to convert Texinfo to manpages, as if I am not wrong there are
many things in Texinfo that cannot be translated to manpages roff.  So
it would probably be a specific converted that is fit to the
presentation of command-line options in Texinfo to convert to roff man
pages.  This could be possible to do a specific converter for that,
though, that would start from the texinfo parser result.

On the other direction, I can mention that there is a pod to texinfo
translator in the Texinfo distribution which is maintained.  It relies
on perl code to parse the pod.  It seems to me that the pod format
possibilities and pod "manuals" match well with man pages organization.
I have reread the code, it is probably not obvious to reuse it for man
roff. Maybe some code could still be reused to do a man roff to
texinfo translator, using a man structure parser similar to Pod::Simple.

-- 
Pat