15 Sep
2019
15 Sep
'19
1:32 p.m.
On 15/09/2019 07:54, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Thank you for the heads up. I never heard of MOM but MM is more familiar.
*I haven't really looked at eqn beyond browsing docs and I'm not sure
how much I should expect from it.*
TeX is (still?) the king of mathematical expression typesetting.
"U'll Be King of the Stars"
<ullbeking(a)andrewnesbit.org> wrote:
Oh, I'm not looking for WYSIWIG or even really WYSIMIM. I'm well used
to writing in structural markup and presentation markup languages, e.g.,
LaTeX (which I think is extremely complicated, and since I left the
university environment I do not miss it).
AS for authoring DocBook I was depending on GNU Emacs to do a lot of the
heavy XML stuff for me. Wishful thinking perhaps.
I've been wondering whether it is possible
and worthwhile to use *roff
for complex technical documentation. I've always loved the aesthetic
that books produced using *roff have but there are other reasons too.
As far as _markup_ is concerned we have DocBook for example. I am also
looking into this. (Also, I understand it's not a typesetting system.)
Unless you use a WYSIWYG tool that generates DocBook, you should avoid it.
Your fingers will kill you. I have written books in troff, DocBook
and Texinfo. Texinfo is *by far* the superior markup language.
I've had a feeling that Texinfo has been getting brushed to the side.
Are you suggesting that Info is a good as a rendered documentation
format? Or just that Texinfo is good for proto-documents that are to be
authored in a parseable and meaningful format?
I've been a long-time GNU Emacs user so reading Info files is OK for me.
But we've never had a _nice_ Info reader, which is why it didn't take
off I think. A lot of people REALLY hate the Info UI.
Moreover it was (is?) very difficult to generate good contents and index
pages with the official tools that I used at the time. I started
working on improving this about 20 years ago but back then it felt as
though the GNU Info and GNU Emacs projects had other things on their minds.
Using Texinfo can generate DocBook which your
publisher can turn into PDF.
(I have done this, three times at least.) But working directly in
DocBook just plain hurts.
OK, so you are suggesting Texinfo as a prototypical markup language, not
necessarily something that will end up as Info files?
I have read the Texinfo documentation and I agree that it seemed like a
rich markup language.
Getting back
to *roff, does anybody know if there is a (hopefully rich)
repository of macros, or any other resources, for my use case? (La)TeX
has this but I'd like to try something else. What do people think?
The MM macros are the most capable of the standard sets that are
out there, although possibly the MOM macros distributed with groff
are even more so; I have not investigated fully. My own wish for the next genie in a lamp that I come
across would be
for a texinfo --> troff translator.
Have you looked at Pandoc? I don't know if it will do this but it's
worth checking out.
Andrew
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