Re: Portability to Mac OS X (was: Sed failure in contrib/sboxes on MacOS)

[T. Kurt Bond]

[I hit "reply" on my previous attempt at this email, so it went only to
Ralph.  Sorry about that.  At least this version has the correct CSTR #.]
I'm an emacs user, and I use the info version of the groff texinfo manual,
as well as the manual pages, and usually go to the trouble of getting the
PDF version of the groff texinfo manual as well.  I tend to use the manual
pages for quick reference and the info version for more detailed reading.
While I'd miss the info version, I also understand why the groff
project would rather have its documentation in a groff-native format.

One advantage that the texinfo manual has that *isn't* built into groff -ms
is the multiple indexes that the texinfo manual produces.  I suspect
someone properly motivated could produce something that would do that,
based on CSTR 128, "Tools for Printing Indexes", and pdfmark, at least for
PDF output.  I have no idea what would be necessary for HTML output.

On Fri, Oct 29, 2021 at 6:14 AM Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.co.uk>
wrote:

> Hi John,
>
> > I was thinking of ms(7) more than manual pages, actually.
> > Think single-page HTML output.
>
> Based on the transcription this list did of Tim O'Reilly's ‘Unix Text
> Processing’ — now only available second hand, https://amzn.to/3bkamGb —
> perhaps an shared effort to switch would work for the info source?
>
> - The hard part would be to agree the destination format.
> - Code 90% of the translation, tinkering with the info source where
>   needed to make the code easier.
> - Fix up the remaining 10% by hand as a shared effort.
>
> --
> Cheers, Ralph.
>
>

-- 
T. Kurt Bond, tkurtbond@gmail.com, https://tkurtbond.github.io