11 Jan
2022
11 Jan
'22
2:57 p.m.
"Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:
But the macros they (also, primarily, Dale
Dougherty)
described there are the basis for the macros they used at ORA when I
started writing for them in 1993. Some time round the turn of the
millennium they then migrated to DocBook, at least for the author
interface. I think that they had some magic to then convert it to
groff. So I don't think it was "too late"; the DocBook conversion
suggests that the authors didn't like groff, though I thought that the
conversion was a retrograde step.
The DocBook conversion make it easy for them to generate HTML so
that books could be put on CD and browsed with a web browser.
I believe that was the main motivation.
I wrote the second edition of "sed & awk" in troff and then they
"converted" it to DocBook (with said backend that went back to
troff for producing print). The conversion to DocBook was a disaster,
such that I threatened to cancel doing the book.
A lot of manual work later, the book came out OK, but boy was it painful.
That backend was still in use ~ 2004 when I did "Unix In A Nutshell"
and "Classic Shell Scripting" but they have moved on since then.
Arnold
P.S. Eric Raymond's love of DocBook not withstanding, it's a miserable
markup language to have to work in.