Re: [Groff] groff as a backend

[Larry Kollar]

Clarke Echols wrote:

> ...  Running vi non-interactively
> inside a shell script (redirect standard input from a file whose
> last line is "ZZ" or ":wq") and using sed inside of vi lets you
> do some really insanely powerful stuff.  I can only imagine
> running awk inside of vi, but I haven't learned it yet...

It's great. I've been using structured FrameMaker at work, and the
most efficient way to get sloppy Word files into Frame is to paste
text into Vim and use awk scripts to wrap everything in XML tags.


And I thought of something that might address Larry McVoy's wish:

> Another problem is that the design of the roff suite of tools is a 
> series
> of filters.  I.e., pic | eqn | tbl | groff.  The problem with that is 
> that
> the earlier stages of the pipeline don't have enough knowledge of the 
> state
> of the doc when they are called.

I have an idea that might even allow the preprocessors/modules
to remain backward-compatible. When gtroff encounters, say, a
TS macro, it could encode the current environment and start tbl,
attaching the environment as an argument to .TS or inserting it
into the table definition.

--
Larry Kollar     k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival"
http://home.alltel.net/kollar/utp/