Hello, T. Kurt Bond wrote on Mon, Jan 20, 2025 at 12:57:16PM -0500: > Branden said:
>> As far as I know, none of pod2man(1), asciidoctor(1), docutils(1), >> or pandoc(1) supports a syntax for inlining "raw" man(7)/*roff >> source into a document. Since this point keeps getting discussed, i'll briefly mention that, when designing a markup language, permitting the inclusion of chunks written in a different markup language is usually terrible language design. The point of a markup language is to support a variety of output formats - for example, in the case of man(7) and mdoc(7) manual pages, nicely typeset PDF output with groff(1), good quality HTML 5 output to publish on the web with mandoc(1), terminal output for viewing from the command line with either groff(1) or mandoc(1), conversion to markdown for use on platforms such as github with mandoc(1), conversion to a semantic search database with the makewhatis(8) tool contained in the mandoc package, to spoken language with a screen reader, and so on. Designing your language such that authors can inline a different language restricts your new language to essentially support only that single output language that can be inlined, so it makes your whole new language essentially pointless. Taking markdown as an example, i have discussed this aspect at length eight years ago at https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170304230520 section "Lack of independence" Besides, if you want to extend the capabilities of the roff(7) language, do not write a roff(7) code generator eating some newly designed language. Instead, for obvious reasons, extend an existing macro set, or design a new macro set if you have extremely good reasons why that is needed. > I'll note that this is a standard part of reStructuredText, which pandoc > supports, and while I have not used it with pandoc's man output, I have > used with pandoc's ms output, allowing some programs I wrote to generate > reStructuredText to include tbl tables when the ultimate output format is > PDF via groff -Tpdf and HTML when the ultimate output is HTML. Other times > I use it directly, to tweak things like page breaks. Moreover, pandoc's > raw_attribute <https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#extension-raw_attribute> > extension allows this in Markdown input. Sure, if your personal task is to write one document with one single output format in mind, even a tool containing that design mistake can prove adequate and helpful in that particular case. Yours, Ingo
