Re: [Groff] Typesetting Markup Language (TML) - a Superset of Groff

[Steve Izma]

On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 12:17:35PM -0500, Larry Kollar wrote:
> Subject: Re: [Groff] Typesetting Markup Language (TML) - a Superset of Groff
> 
> > Yves Cloutier <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Markdown and friends are great for
> > providing a certain level of document structure, however they don't - to my
> > knowledge - provide any facility for specifying document or text styling or
> > more complicated document structure.
> 
> That’s the whole point. ;-) Markdown, and most XML-based systems, deliberately
> kick the formatting can down the road so you can focus on your content. The 
> trick
> is trusting the back-end will give you the output you need. I was aiming 
> toward
> mostly structural markup in the Groff-based system I used at work for several
> years, so I could produce decent HTML when the time came.

I strongly agree that formatting comes later, after you've worked
out the structure and content of your document. And, as James
Lowden says in a subsequent message, you should find a writing
system that allows you to concentrate on writing and that creates
the XML more-or-less automatically afterwards. I've found that,
once the bulk of my writing is done in something like Markdown,
that I can produce an XML document that is really not that hard
to edit later on.

It helps to use a minimalist XML tag set, something like HTML5
with the addition of a few tags related to the type of document
you're working on. For a book, for example, I usually need tags
for copyright information, tables of contents, footnotes, and a
few other things.

I also stick to the principle of the tag name being strictly
structural; I use attributes for specifically typographical
information, e.g., for the odd paragraph that isn't a blockquote
(<bq>) or an epigraph (<epig>) but needs special spacing:

<p space="1v" ti="0P">Text ....</p>

At worst, you can use a processing instruction to force a
typographical intervention, and that allows you to instruct the
parser to ignore the tag for other purposes:

<?gr bp?>

could tell groff to start a new page, fairly unobtrusively.

        -- Steve

-- 
Steve Izma
-
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