Re: [Groff] pic -> png/gif/jpeg?

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2004 at 11:34:59AM -0500, Alejandro Lopez-Valencia wrote:
> I agree with Werner, you are far better off running ghostscript,
> netpbm or Image/Convert-Magick on the postscript output.

Too heavy weight and it forces me to bundle groff with my products.  Nothing
against groff, I clearly love it, but I don't want that much stuff in my
install image.

> Forgive my noisiness: Are you planning an online PIC to raster
> service online? 

Well, this is a bit off topic, but feedback is always interesting.  What we 
are trying to do is build a better way of sharing information.  Roff is a
pretty easy markup language to translate (well, the higher level macros are)
and I've written tools which translate from roff to html.  Our web site
looks like a groff -ms document.  You can see the website (without the
graphics or navigation, just the content) here:

        http://www.bitmover.com/~lm/nifty/

and you can click on pages and see both the page and the roff-like input
to the page.

We're headed in the direction of something like a wiki, online content that
you can modify, use for docs, status, whatever.  Because it is darn close
to roff in format the idea is that you can also generate reasonable printed
output (better than html can).

We're a version control company so we really like roff as an input format,
it versions nicely and and merges nicely.

The pic discussion is because it would be nice to be able to include simple
diagrams in the web pages.
-- 
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Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm