Re: [Groff] gropdf and pdfroff

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Anton,

Anton Shepelev wrote on Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 04:10:26AM +0400:
> Mike Bianchi:
 
>> [...]   To  do even the simplest document requires
>> much-too-much expertise for the rank beginner.
>>
>> What is missing is a Front  Door  that  leads  you
>> gently  into  the  Castle,  teaches  you  the  way
>> through the rooms, closets and  pantries,  so  you
>> can  live  comfortably there with what is present.
>> Then (and only then) should you be led  down  into
>> the  basement  and  shown how the electric, water,
>> heat  and  sewage  utilities  work.   Finally  you
>> should  go  into  the  workshop and start building
>> your own mechanisms.

> This approach to learning Groff would only  work  if
> there  were  a simple, high-level and self-contained
> set of macros that would hide the underlying  mecha-
> nisms  perfectly  well, sparing the user the need to
> intefere with the low-level stuff.

There is at least on such package:  mdoc(7).
Of course, it only aims to support manual pages,
not general text processing and layout.
In that domain, it is so self-contained that it
can even be implemented stand-alone - mandoc(1).
Whenever somebody is using any macro except an mdoc
macro in an mdoc document, i frown upon that as
utterly bad style.  Going down to the basement
is just a bad idea and rarely portable.

The only reasons why mandoc supports some low-level roff
constructs are because some people still use man(7) for
writing manuals, which is not self-contained in the
same sense, and because a few people use low-level roff
constructs in their manuals without a good reason, even
in mdoc code, though rarely.

[...]
> From my own experince,  the  existing  packages  are
> much  stronger coupled with Groff and cannot be used
> without good understanding of Groff itself. I didn't
> try mom though.

Maybe you didn't try mdoc(7), either - or only
considered general purpose packages in this context.

> What  I  was missing the most in the beginning was a
> Groff tutorial that  would  deliver  information  in
> learning  order,  as  opposed to reference order, as
> the info manual does.

Admittedly, i still have to write that for mdoc(7);
right now the best manual is the reference:

  http://mdocml.bsd.lv/mdoc.7.html

Yours,
  Ingo