Hi Mikkel,
mikkel meinike wrote on Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 03:17:17PM +0200:
> Ingo wrote:
>> So technically, the best way to transform groff_mom (7) documents
>> Into HTML would be to parse a high-level MOM node tree and convert
>> That directly to HTML, without going through troff (1) at all, like
>> Mandoc (1) does it for the mdoc (7) language.
As i said, such a converter does not currently exists.
Writing it would probably require some weeks of full-time work.
> Should I understand that if I convert my document with
> groff mydocument.man -t -man -Thtml> mydocument.html
No, that makes no sense at all, for three reasons.
First of all, man(7) is not a general-purpose document format,
but highly specialized for manual pages, and i don't think you
are trying to write a manual page.
If you *are* able to turn the document you are trying to write
into a manual page, then you should not use the outdated man(7)
language, but the newer mdoc(7) language, *in particular* if one
of your target formats is HTML, and you should use
mandoc -T html mydocument.man > mydocument.html
for the conversion rather than groff, which gives way better
results for mdoc(7) input.
Finally, if you are somehow stuck with man(7) - even though i can't
imagine why, in this context - then you should still use the above
mandoc command rather than groff for conversion to HTML.
On the other hand, if you use the general-purpose groff_mom(7)
language, then
groff mydocument.man -t -mom -Thtml > mydocument.html
is indeed your best bet.
> Then it will result in a direct transfer of "man markup" to html markup ??
The above mandoc(1) commands result in direct transfer,
while the above groff(1) commands go through troff(1).
[...]
> As I have looked a bit on tbl in the past day I'v been wondering if
> no one has written some features to make simple spreadsheet arithmetic
> in a tbl table. So that you for instans could have, "sum" in a field
> and the program wuld be able to interpratat it and do and calculated
> of the sum of the above fields during compilation.
The roff language, in particular in its groff variant, is not only a
layout description language, but almost a general-purpose programming
language. In particular, it contains numeric expressions, conditionals,
and loops. You can use that anywhere, in or out of tables.
schwarze@isnote $ mandoc
.nr myvar 2+2
The result is: \n[myvar]
^D
() ()
The result is: 4
August 22, 2017 ()
schwarze@isnote $ nroff
.nr myvar 2+2
The result is: \n[myvar]
^D
The result is: 4
Of course, don't use that in manual pages, but there is nothing
wrong with using it in your private general-purpose documents.
Yours,
Ingo
