Re: [groff] Problems with -Thtml

[Larry Kollar]

Blake McBride <address@hidden> wrote:

> Greetings,
> 
> I composed a user manual with MM.  Looks great.  I now need an HTML
> version.  I tried:
> 
> groff -Thtml -mm build-manual.mm  >build-manual.html
> 
> The HTML file I got is unusable.  It has the following problems:
> 
> 1. The escape sequence '\s0' does not work.  It seems to set the font to a
> very, very small font rather than returning to the previous font.
> 
> 2.  '.ce 4' should not fill the next four lines but it does
> 
> 3.  '\s0' is poorly documented in the groff manual

I looked at the HTML implementation a while back. There’s a lot of
behind the scenes things that need to be added to macro packages,
and they haven’t been done for -mm. They’ve been done for -ms, -man,
and I guess -mdoc uses a different path to get HTML. There’s an extra
set of macros that you can use for lists and the like, but that doesn’t
help for -mm.

The good news is, you’re halfway to a solution. I’ve had good luck
taking XHTML output from MultiMarkdown and using an XSLT transform
to output *roff. It’s not perfect, but a cleanup script catches most of the
problems. You should be able to do the same thing with Asciidoc’s XHTML
output.

        Larry