I wonder if anyone has put any consideration into developing an XSL-FO to groff converter?
I maintain an XSLT stylesheet for generating man-page output from DocBook XML source documents that contain Refentry elements. It is included in the DocBook XSL stylesheets distribution (in the "manpages" directory): http://docbook.sourceforge.net/snapshots/xsl/manpages/ So I have been following the recent discussions here (about XML, but also about front-ends for editing groff) with some interest. I guess most people consider groff from the perspective of authoring/editing documents in it directly. But I think it's also interesting to consider groff as a powerful rendering engine that can take documents converted from other authoring formats and render them in a variety of output formats. For example, I have recently been attempting to put together a "standard" Makefile for generating output from DocBook docs. For the specific case of documents containing DocBook Refentry elements, it does: DocBook Refentry -> man DocBook Refentry -> man -> PDF DocBook Refentry -> man -> text The PDF and text output parts just rely on the built-in output capabilities in groff and Ghostscript. But that chain is currently useable only for transforming Refentry content. The DocBook stylesheets also include a set of stylesheets for converting any DocBook content to XSL-FO: http://docbook.sourceforge.net/snapshots/xsl/fo/ So if an XSL-FO converter were implemented in groff, it'd be possible to do: DocBook -> XSL-FO -> groff -> PDF DocBook -> XSL-FO -> groff -> PS DocBook -> XSL-FO -> groff -> DVI And to any other output formats that groff can convert to. There have been some attempts to implement XSL-FO converters in TeX/LaTex/PDFTeX, but that has proven to be a pretty difficult taks, and those work on those apps never reached the point where they became usable for production-quality work. I wonder if it would be easier to implement an XSL-FO to PDF converter in groff, or harder. --Mike -- Michael Smith http://sideshowbarker.net/
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