Re: Future of groff Texinfo manual (was: documentation of hyphenation)

[T . Kurt Bond]

On Mon, 29 Jun 2020 14:36:31 -0400,
> G. Branden Robinson wrote on Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 03:08:04AM +1000:
> > [1] The only painful part of this is losing Larry Kollar's ms node,
> > which is the _only_ macro package that has ever documented well in
> > Texinfo as far as I can tell.  I think it would be pretty elegant to
> > port this material to an ms document, ship it with the groff
> > distribution, and point people to it.  Alternatively, the chapter could
> > be reframed as an example of how to document a macro package, discarding
> > its current pretentions to comprehensiveness.

Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de> wrote:
> I don't feel strongly about this either way.  I mean, -ms it not
> exactly the most relevant macro package in 2020, or is it?

I think -ms is still relevant.  It is (I think) the only package other
than -mom that was adapted to work with pdfmark, as documented in
"Portable Document Format Publishing with GNU Troff".  (I've often
wished someone had adapted -mm.)  And along with -man, -ms is
supported as an output format for the popular pandoc document
converter, useful for both people who want to convert from 30+ formats
including org-mode, markdown, ReStructuredText, MS Word docx and
OpenOffice/LibreOffice ODT, into more palatable troff -ms, or those
who just want to convert those formats into PDF via pdfroff with -ms
because groff is available by default or easily on most operating
systems and a groff installation is 2 orders of magnitude smaller that
a TeX install and is usually much faster processing documents
producing PDF.

As for the ms info node, I agree it would be good to integrate the
information from that into the groff_ms(7) man page.  (I don't see
something like the info section "General structure of an `ms'
document" in groff_ms(7), for instance; this was in "Using groff with
the -ms Macro Package" by Larry Kollar, but that document may have
been superseded; I can only find a PDF version of it on the net at
https://www.mail-archive.com/ion-general@lists.berlios.de/msg01838/ms.pdf ).
If that happens and the ms info node is removed, it should be at least
replaced with a pointer to the man pages like most of the macro
packages mentioned.

-- 
T. Kurt Bond, tkurtbond@gmail.com
-- 
T. Kurt Bond, tkurtbond@gmail.com