I've learned to use wiki in a development team, and managed the wikish
language like
== this is for header ==
=== this is for higher level header ==
*Bold text*
wiki helped the development team a lot by allowing multiple user working
on a same document and share the update by just looking at the web
pages, and very short easy way to format text (with limitation). However
it sucks because
1. It has too few formatting options
2. It always prints bad. e.g. take a look at Pentaho development
team's wiki, I wonder if any of these developers ever print their
documents at all! I never managed to get them printed without
having righter half of paragraph cut away on A4.
3. Lack of everything like proper page header, footer etc.
When I started to learn groff (and finally given up using it in
productional environment thanks to Chinese language support), I fund the
macro names are lovingly terse. The document written in groff is not
longer than in wiki code but you have much more control over document
format.
Then came the idea of using roff as a wiki language. Advantage:
1. It's easy to provide "download as PDF for printing" feature by
just passing the wiki page to groff. The wiki software writer
doesn't have to use php-pdf library etc to create his own (usually
worse) print output engine;
2. It's easy to show the result on the web. When user submit the wiki
code, the wiki software can store the wiki code on disk and when
requested to display it, get HTML output using groff.
3. Much much more control on layout, formatting, styles (TL/NH etc)
4. Browser-safe and web-server safe. User unlikely to use browser's
security problem or PHP's security hole, because the processing is
done with groff.
Disadvantage
1. wiki code language is designed in the way that it always accept
input. If you didn't format it correct in wiki, it's just you
didn't get the wanted result. No syntax error message. You always
get something, this makes it easier to start to learn using wiki.
is roff the same?
I googled but didn't find a wiki software using roff language. How do
you think of this idea?
