From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: arnold@skeeve.com (arnold@skeeve.com)
Date: Tue, 15 May 2018 10:55:46 -0600
Subject: [TUHS] Who used *ROFF?
In-Reply-To: <20180515155621.0B986200C2@orac.inputplus.co.uk>
References: <201805151252.w4FCq3Fx002374@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>
 <CAC20D2M5-krMuR-EK=EyufUwjtLJTZeucfByknCFbD3qy5jqpg@mail.gmail.com>
 <201805151423.w4FENYlQ010613@freefriends.org>
 <20180515155621.0B986200C2@orac.inputplus.co.uk>
Message-ID: <201805151655.w4FGtlbw029930@freefriends.org>

> Arnold wrote:
> > DocBook. Bleah.

Ralph Corderoy <ralph at inputplus.co.uk> wrote:
> Eric S. Raymond has a long-term plan underway to get all man-page source
> moved to DocBook or asciidoc using his doclifter program, and convincing
> projects to make the switch.  Unfortunately, some have.  DocBook stinks
> and it shows how long the project has been going that Eric chose it back
> when it and XML were still shiny.
>
> He argues that decent-quality output, e.g. PDF, isn't required any more.

He's wrong about that, and also that DocBook is wonderful. It's great
for machine processing (which is why O'Reilly likes it) but it's AWFUL
for the human author.

In fact, it's so bad that these days O'Reilly uses AsciiDoc with a
toolchain to convert to DocBook for printing.

> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7998

Interesting reading (I skimmed it), but I will never switch any of
my man pages over to DocBook.

My two cents (as we wander even further afield),

Arnold