Re: [groff] groff as the basis for comprehensive documentation?

[John Gardner]

>
>
>
> *So you’re going to insert devtags to pass semantic info to the
> postprocessor?...Personally, I think you’re going to have better luck
> passing semantic hints through as you mentioned above.*


Sort of. Sticking to pre- and post-processors is really about separation of
concerns more than anything else. There're no assumptions about what macro
packages an author's using, which preprocessors they're using, or even what
fonts they use. As long as Kernighan's output language is what we're
dealing with... game on.

*Any chance you could use an MUA that has a consistent quoting style and
> ties In-Reply-To, References, and the bits being quoted together? Otherwise
> threading for those of us using it suffers.*


Shit, I'm so sorry. =( I'm writing from Gmail (in Chrome), and applying
formatting manually. This <https://i.imgur.com/OMjYcDl.png> is what I'm
looking at right now...

I keep forgetting how this must look to users of other mail clients... :(


On 22 April 2018 at 01:06, Larry Kollar <address@hidden> wrote:

> Some of this is really cool, and ties in with a couple things I’ve tried
> in the past.
>
> John Gardner <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > *1. Handling semantics*
> > We all know you can't draw semantics from cold, low-level formatting
> > commands. But for certain contexts - hierarchically sorted documents,
> > consistently indented code-samples and tables marked as tables, I believe
> > (okay, *hoping)* it's possible to reconstruct meaning from... well, stuff
> > that looks like this:
> >
> > n12000 0 V84000 H72000
> > x X devtag:.NH 1
> > x font 36 TB
> > f36s10950V84000H72000
> >
> > How? See the x X devtag line? That's what inspired this whole landslide
> of
> > absurd ambition. I wondered what we could do if more metadata were
> provided
> > that way – as device-specific control strings from, say, a preprocessor.
>
> So you’re going to insert devtags to pass semantic info to the
> postprocessor?
> Cool idea. I wrote a script called “htbl” some years back to go with
> grothml; it
> turns a subset of tbl markup into HTML tables. I never thought of using
> devtags
> to mark rows/cells like that; it might have worked better.
>
> > ...
> >
> > We know the widths and heights of each mounted device-font, their
> > kerning-pairs, ligatures, and lord knows what else. We milk this for all
> > it's worth: by plotting each glyph's bounding box in a scaled space
> > representing the output medium, we identify the most obvious constructs
> > first.
>
> That’s pretty similar to the PDF-to-markup thing I blithered about earlier.
> I think a more skilled programmer than myself (I’m a jumped up tech writer)
> could really make it work well… although as i said before, each document
> is unique. Personally, I think you’re going to have better luck passing
> semantic
> hints through as you mentioned above. But it does sound like fun! I hope
> you
> keep us posted.
>
>         Larry
>
>
>