Hi Adam, Adam Thompson wrote on Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 03:27:46PM -0500: > On 14-08-16 01:01 PM, Norman Gray wrote:
>> To do this, I took the HTML versions of the FAQ sections, and >> normalised them into regular XHTML (which makes them processable >> into other forms). With that done, it was straightforward to >> transform the result into both HTML for presentation, and into LaTeX >> for further transformation into PDF. This depends on the xsltproc >> package, and obviously on LaTeX. > [...] >> It would be pretty straightforward to generate a .txt FAQ from these >> same sources (via *roff). Regarding the OP's mail, TL;DR (and too complicated). > I find that this work would be useful to me - there are (admittedly > rare) occasions where I want an offline copy of the documentation. > > But... shouldn't the "master" copy be in mdoc(7) format? ;-) > > Now, if anyone actually took that seriously: You'd be surprised to hear that i discussed that very question with Nick@ last year in Toronto, and we both agreed that would be useful. We just didn't come round to it yet. > I believe work on doclifter(1) and docbook2mdoc(1) is already in > consideration, That would be me. > perhaps there's an reasonably-automatic way to do the conversion? Almost certainly. You would have to write a small one-time conversion script in whatever scripting language you like (i'd probably go for Perl if i were to do it). doclifter(1) doesn't help much, actually, because the starting point is not man(7), so docbook2mdoc(1) isn't much use either, for this particular task. > If not, I certainly don't think it's worth the time to > change it by hand. Well no, some scripting support is certainly required unless you are *very* bored. But that shouldn't be too hard to write. Yours, Ingo
