Re: [Groff] Future direction of groff

[Walter Alejandro Iglesias]

On Tue, Feb 04, 2014 at 09:42:05PM -0500, James K. Lowden wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Feb 2014 15:43:11 -0500
> "Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> I have to say, unfortunately, that I think the entire
>> presentation-centric model within which groff lives just about run
>> its course.  The future belongs to structural markup and stylesheets,
>> because of the requirement for rendering in multiple output media
>> including the Web.
>
> Hmm, seems to me every document is presentation-centric, depending on
> what that means.  Are you suggesting Postscript and PDF are not long
> for this world?  Are we doomed to the eyesores produced by
> lousy-browser ebook readers?
>


>> Cutting them loose from their groff-centric assumptions and making
>> them generate more modern low-level formats like XSL-FO and SVG is a
>> groff2 I could get behind
>
> Nothing stands in the way of another post-processor, groxslfo, right?


Time ago I wrote a bash script using sed, imagemagick, tidy, able to translate
my novels written with latex to xhtml (it would be easier with groff).
Obviously utf8 wasn't a problem for it.  A lot of work, not the better way (I
don't know perl), not useful for everybody, not useful in every case.  And
that's exactly the point, when you count with small tools that do one thing and
do it well you can combine them to fit your needs.

Perhaps a bad side effect of FOSS or some Rock Star syndrome leads people to
write programs that do a lot of things, in all scenarios, in all cases, useful
for everyone.  Quality?