Re: (off topic?) Docbook? Re: manlint?

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2020-09-18T01:18:06+1000, John Gardner wrote:
> To preserve metadata, or identify regions of semantic or structural
> interest, write a preprocessor to delineate unprocessed roff(7) syntax
> with device control functions:
> 
> .TH \X'meta: begin title'TITLE\X'end title'

Yes.

> Which comes out looking like this in troff's intermediate output:
> 
> x X meta: begin title
> t TITLE
> x X meta: end title
> 
> Which postprocessors can use if they have some reason to care about
> semantic data.

Yes!

> Even if you only care about extracting abstract info instead of
> rendering a document, there's no reason a postprocessor actually has
> to be a typesetter:
> 
> $ infer | troff | post-infer --extract-outline --xml ./outline.xml
> | grotty | less
> 
> Of course, this would require infer to have prior knowledge of
> specific macro packages, but I fail to see that being an issue.
> Moreover, infer can also identify preprocessor markup, such as tables,
> pictures, equations, and any other shite that's impossible to
> recognise in preprocessor output.
> 
> This is similar in spirit to what Werner Lemberg started with
> devtag.tmac, which grohtml(1) already uses to identify numbered
> headings and section titles, Personally, there's a lot more we could
> be doing with that same technique.

Yes!  Yes!  Yes!

I've poked my snout a little bit into grohtml recently because I had to
test my changes to the handling of the man(7) registers (C, D, P, X)
that aren't honored when the output device is -Thtml.  I dimly perceive
a lot of good infrastructure there that could be put to some excellent
use.  We just need a contributor to pick up the mission.

Regards,
Branden

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