On 03-Mar-09 17:48:02, Robert Goulding wrote: > On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 10:58 AM, Jeremy C. Reed <r...@reedmedia.net> > wrote: >>> "GNU troff?? What is that? These days the publishers really want >>> either MSWord or TEX files. We can try the HTML result, but I >>> predict lots of issues in the typesetting! You'll be correcting >>> proofs for weeks. >> >> Maybe try troffcvt >> http://www.snake.net/software/troffcvt/ >> > Thanks, I'll definitely try this. Looking through the documentation, > it seems that it has no support for macro packages, and would not be > able to handle footnotes in an intelligent way (it also ignores page > position traps). So I don't know whether it's going to be better than > my grohtml workflow - but I'll try anything. > > Will still appreciate improvements to my native-groff procedure! > > Robert.
The following is my personal opinion. I have been through the business of intially creating nice groff formatting (resulting in PS/PDF files) only to have co-workers and publishers insist on Word. This was years ago. I tried troffcvt, and was very disappointed with its capabilities. It can cope with very primitive troff, has problems with macros, and (as far as I remember) does not recognise any of your own macro, string or character definitions. Seeing Jeremy's suggestion of troffcvt above, I visited the website. I see it was last updated in 2001-01-13 , and describes version 1.04. I then went back to the ancient machine on which I installed it, and Lo! I find that it is version 1.04, installed in June 1997! What I found was that, even if you could get workable RTF out of troffcvt, and import it into Word, the amount of work you had to do to then get the Word document into decent shape was a close approximation to re-typing it from scratch! In the end, I wrote an 'awk' script that stripped out some troff formatting, and recognised paragraphs so that it output each paragraph as one continuous line (where Word is concerned, it treats CRLF -- or used to -- as a paragraph break). In-line escapes were kept in, as were some other things (including some macro calls) that could be read in as if they were part of the text. Then I went through the Word document with "Search", making by hand the formatting changes that corresponded to the troff markup. There was also some "find and replace" work, These documents were chapters for a book, so there was a lot of work, However, it was feasible, and the best way (I think) to proceed. Another approach I tried once was to write an 'awk' script to convert my troff into WordPerfect 5.1. This could be done almost perfectly, since (bless them!) WordPerfect published the full details of the file format for WP5.1 (including tables, font changes, non-English characters which were based on a 2-byte encoding which I think may have been an early version of utf8). Also, the WordPerfect 5.1 equation editor used a decription language very closely related to eqn. The resulting WP-5.1 could be imported directly into Word (though not always successfully, since Word tended to have its own view of what WordPerfect meant by their format). On the other hand, in those days, publushers were often happy to deal directly with WoedPerfect files. Another approach I have used (when the publisher was happy with it), one instance of which goes back to my earliest exposure to UNIX troff in the early 1980s, is to use groff to produce "camera-ready" copy. I have produced 3 books in this way. You need to get very precise and detailed page layout instructions from the publisher (and this may include fonts), but once armed with that you can press on with groff. Groff, after all, is capable of making arbitrary marks at arbitrary positions on the page, entirely under your own very precise control! These days, of course, once you have the layout instructions, the publisher will probably be quite happy to work with the final version in PDF format. The overall impression that all of that left me with, though, is that troff and Word are incompatible; and (again in my view) Word has in-built Tourette's Syndrome. Some publishers, indeed, will happily work with UNIX troff or GNU groff. Not only O'Reilly (that goes without saying), but also Harper-Collins, with whom I have done some work on their multilingual dictionaries. They had a program to convert from XML (which is what the dictionaries were initially composed in) to troff. I was also able to write 'awk' routines to do the same sort of thing, but with refinements. The resulting troff source was then sent off to their printers, who could deal with it as it stood (again, bless them!). As to TeX -- I have very little experience of using that (when I once tentatively embarked on a potential migration from troff to TeX, I found the learning effort excessive for the end result; in those days TeX did some things well, but troff did other things better -- maybe it still does). But there may be mileage in trying to convert from troff to TeX, since the basic principles are similar. Another possibility is to use groff to produce ".dvi" output. If a publisher can cope with TeX, they can deal with ".dvi" somehow. Again, this tends to come back to doing the entire final formatting oneself, conforming to the publisher's style and layout requirements. Just some thoughts. I'm afraid I don't have any neat solution for Robert's problem, and the above is based on my past experience, some of it from a long time ago. Best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.hard...@manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 03-Mar-09 Time: 18:52:07 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
