> The biggest culprit is info--a maddeningly archaic facility to which
> Gnu clings tenaciously. Unless it can be foreseen how new man
> macros would displace texinfo from its throne, the exercise will
> largely be in vain.
I think this is a bit unfair. Given that info was essentially the
first hypertext system, long before HTML has been in use, it works
remarkably well. Doing a search over multiple HTML pages is a
nightmare even today. Ditto for quickly looking up an index. Using
standalone info (or the info-mode of emacs to get images also), this
works just fine!
> Tbl is a bigger deal, because nesting comes to the fore. I sweated
> a while back to make a table that contained pic diagrams, images,
> and equations, as well as plain text. The grail remains to be found.
Have you ever had a look at hdtbl? See groff_hdtbl(7); the
`mixed_pickles.ps' example file neatly shows its capabilities.
> Of all the preprocessors, Refer is probably the weakest. One of
> the "parallel galleys" mentioned above, it may profit from some
> architectural support. It certainly needs style sheets--another
> aspect of frontend modularity. I would suggest, too, that the set of
> categories (author, date, etc) be modest, but extensible. Bibtex's
> "exhaustive" list is overkill, I think.
If at all, refer should be more or less replaced with an interface to
`biber', providing an interface similar to `biblatex' so that the
abundant bibliography databases written for bibtex can be easily used.
> Speaking of macros, is there any hope of reconciling the macro
> schemes of groff, pic, and eqn? Or is it obviously silly to try?
... backwards compatibility...
Werner
