Re: your mail

[Nik Clayton <nik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Jun 12, 1999 at 01:12:36PM -0400, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> Nik Clayton <nik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> > The dilemma I face is this -- I really, really want to avoid having to 
> > document and support a plethora of tools, stylesheets, and stylesheet
> > languages.  Every new hurdle that gets thrown up is one more barrier to
> > volunteers actually contributing documentation.
> 
> Well, obviously, the only possible solution which fits your
> requirements is to write an NROFF backend for Jade (or OpenJade).
> While yer at it, we *really* need a rewritten, raw TeX backend.  If
> you're ambitious, how about a TeXinfo backend too, to make the GNU
> folks happy (texinfo is still their official documentation format).

Yep.  If I had both the time and technical know-how (C++ is not my area
of expertise) I'd have embarked on this project myself.  Because I don't
I'm reduced to standing on the side-lines, shouting "Rah rah" every time
it looks like someone might volunteer to do it.

I live in hope.

> Personally, if all you're trying to achieve is <refenty> -> manpage, I
> would think the easiest way would be to (gasp) write your own
> formatter in Perl or Python or whatever (hopefully free tool, please).

Yeah.  If the crunch comes then that's what I'll do.  But I won't need it
for another year or more, so I haven't done anything about it.

The aforementioned Chuck Robey is working on an XML based system to do
DocBook -> *roff using (I assume) sx to get DocBook SGML to DocBook XML,
and then an XSLT translator to go from there to *roff.

N
-- 
 [intentional self-reference] can be easily accommodated using a blessed,
 non-self-referential dummy head-node whose own object destructor severs
 the links.
    -- Tom Christiansen in <375143b5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


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