Re: <OK> [Groff] Simplifying groff documentation

[Michael(tm) Smith]

Gunnar Ritter <address@hidden>, 2007-01-03 18:30 +0100:

> The other side is that it is much easier to convert DocBook
> to troff directly.

True. And people familiar with LaTex and ConTeXt find it much
easier to convert DocBook to those formats directly. It makes
great sense if DocBook is the only XML vocabulary the community
wants to be able to generate print/PDF output. It starts to look a
lot less appealing as more XML vocabularies enter the picture.

> It is mainly a question of effort to implement the various
> elements and attributes, and can principally be done with not
> much more than XSLT and an appropriate troff macro set.

That's basically what Beno??t Guillon has done with dblatex:

  http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/

Except that he's convering to LaTeX/ConTeXt.

I'm not saying I think the "direct from DocBook to an existing
print backend" is absolutely a bad approac (I actually have the
build of the DocBook Project XSLT stylesheets set up to use
dblatex to generatethe PDF version of the release notes).

I would personally love to see a direct DocBook-to-troff
converter. But I'm a DocBook user. If I were a TEI user, I'd
probably be a lot less keen on the idea of somebody putting time
into making a print processor that only works for DocBook.

  --Mike