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Re: [groff] Creating a numbered list without macros


From: Ingo Schwarze
Subject: Re: [groff] Creating a numbered list without macros
Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2018 18:12:18 +0200
User-agent: Mutt/1.8.0 (2017-02-23)

Hi Yves,

Yves Cloutier wrote on Sat, Aug 11, 2018 at 11:32:57AM -0400:

> .br
> .sp

That is redundant.  The .sp request already implies .br, see:
https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/Manipulating-Spacing.html#index-sp

> .ll -5
> .in +3
> .ti -1

For .in and .ti, the default scaling indicator is m, but i would
consider in good practice to explicitly specify it for readability.  

Why are you reducing the line length?  It doesn't seem required
around a list.  The .in request does not move the line length to
the right, the indentation is part of the line length.  Besides,
for .ll, the manual doesn't even specify the default unit, so 
specifying the unit seems even more helpful for clarity.

> Probably not ideal it did give me the output that I was looking for.
>  As I mentionned I'm using a programming language

What you show below is not a programming language but a markup language.

> title         {My New Book}
> subtitle     {And Other Gems}
> h1 {1 Level 1 Heading}

Just curious - why are you using a syntax that is structurally
different from, but functionally equivalent to roff macro syntax?
It seems to me that you get the downside of having to implement
your own parser (as opposed to trivially being able to just use the
groff parser), but you don't get any additional benefit that i can
see for that additional effort.

Same question asked in a different way, why don't you just implement
a macro set?

Oh, and why don't you just pick one of the existing macro sets?  I
think all of them can do what you are showing here, so you would
save even more effort using one of them, with the additional benefit
that other people could more easily read your document because it
would be written in a well-known markup language rather than in a
newly invented one.

Yours,
  Ingo



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