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[Groff] html to roff


From: Tadziu Hoffmann
Subject: [Groff] html to roff
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2014 11:16:46 +0200
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15)


I wanted to have a paper hardcopy of a (simple) web page to
hand out to new people here at work, but I wasn't happy with
the results from either Firefox or wkhtmltopdf.  (Due to my
viewing preferences, the output from Firefox was completely
unusable [why aren't there different settings for screen
display and printing?], and wkhtmltopdf had the nasty habit of
introducing subtle random-seeming irregular spacing between the
letters of every word [wtf?]).  So I decided to roll my own.

My solution consists of a sed script that converts the html
stream into a roff-compatible line-oriented format, and a small
set of macros that reads a sort of style sheet and typesets
the converted input accordingly.  There is no real box model,
therefore also no floats and side-by-side stuff, and classes
and inline-styles aren't supported either; neither are tables
(my web page didn't require them).  But for very simple HTML
pages it works quite well.  Oh yes, and it's *blazingly fast*
compared to the other options.

I'm not sure when (or if) I will continue working on the
project, as it already does what it was designed to do.
But if anybody is interested in grabbing some ideas, you can
find it in ~hoffmann/roff/html on www.usm.uni-muenchen.de.





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