Re: [9fans] htmlroff

[Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com>]

If I remember right - and I might not - I looked into an
html driver or terminal type for troff, but gave up and
did man2html instead, which took a radically smpler
tack than ms2html and scored a little better overall
but much worse in some cases.

Don't you think a better long-term plan would be
to abandon troff?

-rob

On 1/4/06, Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com> wrote:
> Is anyone interested in hacking on a simple version
> of troff that generates html?  The idea is to implement
> most of the troff base language and add primitives for
> putting in raw html and watching to make sure tags get
> matched properly.  It's considerably simpler than troff
> since one doesn't have to deal with the low-level details
> of text layout, character widths, and so on.
>
> The idea is that then htmlroff could use the existing
> macro packages more or less directly, perhaps with a
> few small changes.  It would replace both ms2html,
> which works at a higher level, and troff2html, which
> works at a lower level.  It could format the manual
> pages as well as the papers, and the resulting html
> would actually look good and be easy to change
> (just edit the macros).
>
> Completing the picture would be versions of pic, eqn,
> and tbl that emit SVG, MathML, and HTML tables.
>
> I've started to cannibalize ms2html to build htmlroff,
> but I really don't have much time to spend on it.
>
> Russ
>