On Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 12:33:12AM +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > Subject: Re: [Groff] Regarding HTML rendering > > Steve Izma wrote on Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 04:52:56PM -0400: > > > A relatively simple notation like Markdown would also work, > > I agree with all you are saying except this. > > The OP is certainly better off writing his documents in proper > roff(7) or groff_mom(7) and living with slighly quirky HTML output > than writing his documents in markdown and getting crappy output > quality in *all* output formats. Converting markdown into acceptable > roff input is just not feasible - not only because there is no tool > to do it, but also because markdown is just not powerful enough, > even if you were willing to write a new program to do that.
Hi Ingo, Thanks for the comments. But I feel like I've sprung a page trap that sent me into an entirely different document by merely using the word "Markdown". You've misunderstood me, since I referred to a "simple notation *like* Markdown [emphasis added]" for which one should use a script to create input for groff. I wasn't at all suggesting using Markdown or anything like it for creating groff source documents because I don't know of any generally available tool that does this. > Besides, i hate the myth being re-iterated that markdown would be > easy to use. It is an extremely hostile, hard-to-use language > because it doesn't have any kind of consistent syntax, but instead > three strongly conflicting ones, so the rules for what any given > input means are usually extremely complicated and counter-intuitive, > and besides, there is almost no markdown document that is portable > because the details of all three syntaxes differ from one implementation > to the other, and there is no lack of conflicting implementations. > > For details why you should never use or recommend markdown as a > source language for any documents, see > > http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170304230520 It seems to me this argument implies a desire for a general-purpose markup language for creating typeset documents, which I think is an impossible goal. I'm interested in a simple markup notation for writing texts that I will later convert to probably an XML document for long-term archiving and use, and from that to various output formats. If the target is a part of a book, I would need to do it differently than I would if it were a journal article. If it were a poster or some other short, layout-intensive item, I wouldn't bother with markup. Any ascii-based notation like Markdown or MediaWiki can be used or adapted; their backends are irrelevant to this. And many of the complaints you have don't make any difference to me: in forty-five years of typesetting I've never needed to use bold-italic-bold; definition lists are a weird deviation from typographical style -- I would never reproduce in print what the HTML definition list displays in a browser; there are all sorts of ways of handling what you call mixing block and flow (I would call them block-level elements and in-line elements) in converting to groff code with or without a parser. I think what you're saying about line spaces at EOL (an admittedly bizarre notation) that affect list parsing might be relevant to the main problem I have with these types of notations: they insist on list elements being exactly one line long, which is just the result of a syntax inadequate or too lazy for designating the beginning and the end of a list. I would simply add opening and closing list markers to my conversion script (which could be awk, sed, python, etc.). Anyway, simple Markdown and MediaWiki types of notation are important in the area of publishing where I work because we need a text-based system of inputting that can replace the widespread use of word processors. This is obviously an uphill battle, but I've seen the appeal of things like Markdown (probably MultiMarkdown and AsciiDoc) at workshops and seminars, where it has clearly not been difficult to use. LaTeX and groff are not markup languages for structured documents; obviously, they're for presentation. You can fake structure by using high-level macro requests, but then you end up with something like XML without the angle brackets. And the current command set in LaTeX is too verbose and intrusive in a writing context. I think MOM has much more concisely named requests that are meant for semantic clarity. You may be perfectly correct in completely dismissing poor implementations of a tool, but given the need for a simple markup language I think it's a good idea to compare different approaches that have potential to aid writing and that separate content structure from presentation. -- Steve -- Steve Izma si...@golden.net Home: 35 Locust St., Kitchener ON 519-745-1313 Canada, N2H 1W6 cell: 519-998-2684
