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

[John Gardner]

>
> 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.


This has been on my to-do list for Roff.js
<https://github.com/Alhadis/Roff.js> for quite some time (ETA hopefully
this *decade*). Once/if I finish a POC, I'd be happy to reimplement it in
Perl and submit it to Groff.

I've a solid idea in my head of how infer(1) would work, I just haven't
gotten off my arse to implement it yet... :-)

On Sun, 27 Sep 2020 at 16:49, G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>