Re: Readability of troff documents (Was: [Groff] Bug in gxditview)

[Gaius Mulley]

"Giorgos Magos" <address@hidden> writes:

> > Last, would you really tell that a non computer person
> > nowadays uses troff in any way?
> 
> I don't think so! However, one of the most interesting
> applications of [gt]roff these days (I think) is the
> programmatic generation of high quality text, eg reports
> from databases, form letters, etc. In such an environment
> the user would be isolated from [gt]roff itself, using some
> other interface, a web form for example. He or she would
> have to enter blocks of text, though, eg text to accompany a
> quotation, the body of a letter, etc. While I could filter
> this through sed before feeding it to [gt]roff, I just think
> that em dashes and en dashes are just too common to require
> special escape codes. Anyway, just a thought. I can
> certainly live with filtering through sed (which I suppose
> I'd have to do anyway in most cases...).

all true, and could be extended easily to make the same single
source generate output for PDA's, web pages and paper.

Nevertheless it would be great to have a pseudo dreamweaver front end
(lyx) for producing groff allowing new users to edit the troff or edit
the wysiwyg. I wonder whether this could be done in Python?

Gaius