Re: [Groff] doclifter on groffer.man

[groff-bernd . warken-72]

> Von: address@hidden

> There has never been any IETF RFP, nor ANSI/ISO/W3C committee work.
> Thus, there is no de jure standard here, only a de facto one.

It is the GNU standard, so it is the standard in the world of free software.
We spit on all commercial standards.  We use them to extend them to useful
additions.

> In any case, I already said I would be willing to implement these
> extensions if my doing so actually solved the problem.  But it
> wouldn't, as Gunnar Ritter showed me and has since done a good job of
> demonstrating to others.

You have to solve your own problems instead of killing other good projects.

> As at least two people other than me have explained at length, grohmtl
> produces very thin and poor HTML.  It's not "beautiful" because, among
> other things, it doesn't meet the needs of people doing accessibility
> work for the blind.

The stuff for blind people can be done within HTML.  So `grohtml' can be
fixed in order to do this.  But apart from that `grohtml' can translate  all
`groff' input into HTML without any flames, so `doclifter' should be able to
do that as well because XML is an extension compared to HTML.  You could
learn from `grohtml', it is free.

>  The structural analysis in doclifter relies
> on information that gets thrown away during macro evaluation.

So you should replace the macro calls by the macro content and translate the
result.

> Total: 13117 man pages
> Patched: 390 (2.97%)     -- these are mostly for outright markup errors
> With patches: 99.47%     -- so doclifter fails to lift only 0.53% of pages
> Without patches: 96.49%

But the output produced by `doclifter' is quite ugly in `openoffice'.  And 
strange
error messages are produced.  For example, `doclifter' on `bash.1' produces the
warning `warning: RS/RE seen.'.  The `.RS/.RE' requests are absolutely normal
`man' stuff, a warning is trash.  A lot of things have to be done with 
`doclifter',
so you could also do your `groff' problems.

> Are you really prepared to argue that a program that converts 99.51% of
> well-formed man pages and over 96% even when you include broken ones is
> not meeting the de-facto standard?

Yes.

> The way this discussion has been going,
> if you do maintain that position you are likely to find yourself in a
> minority of one.

When the slime is replaced back to reason more will come.

Bernd Warken