From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
From: Fco.J.Ballesteros <nemo@plan9.escet.urjc.es>
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Subject: [9fans] bib tool for troff and html conversion revisited
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 09:27:12 +0100
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I found a tool that does all the bib stuff for me, including
formatting. Besides I made a silly html converter (see below).

I just got the source code of a bibliography tool
for troff called bib and used ape to get it working.
It can be found at http://plan9.escet.urjc.es/export/troffbib.tgz

The format of the bib files is quite straightforward (not like bibtex)
and the syntax for citations is easy to remember (and you don't have
to remember identifiers to make a citation).

I also wanted to get the paper converted to html without human
intervention, so I tried both ms2html and troff2html. The
troff2html output
did not convince me (problems w/ .IP, etc.),
and ms2html couldn't handle bib entries (which are not ms macros)

Thus I did the following as an experiment:
- changed ms2html to accept pseudo device control strings to be
 passed as-is to the output.
- used sam to make silly scripts bib2html tbl2html etc. that
 replace the involved portions of input with html.

I think the output is reasonable given the kludges I made in
these *2html scripts.

As an example, this is the mkfile rule I use:
box.html: box.ms
	bib box.ms | fig  | bib2html | pic2html | tbl2html |
		ms2html > box.html

IMHO the experient result says that this can work
nicely; i.e. same nice output of ms2html but still able to
format non-ms troff packages. What about going in this direction
instead of improving troff2html to handle it all on its own?

I mean, such intermediate blah2html filters can translate macros or
whatever weird troff construction be used in the source,
when the input model can still be matched to the html one.

Although my set of scripts would probably fail if the document does
not follow the conventions I follow, I placed them at
http://plan9.escet.urjc.es/export/troffutil.tgz, just
to illustrate what I mean.