"Eric S. Raymond" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, 2006-12-23 00:56 -0500:
> Well, no, actually. DocBook -> man is easy -- you're throwing away > structure when you do that. man -> DocBook is *hard*, because you have > to deduce semantic structure from presentation-level cliches. DocBook -> man may be easy in terms of not needing to preserve structure. But it's not particularly easy in other ways -- especially since the most likely way to do it is with XSLT, and XSLT (well, XSLT 1.0 at least) has some serious limitations as a programming language, and those limitations can make it a real chore do certain things that are dead simple in most other languages (string manipulations, regex string replacements, storing and retrieving data in/from data structures). And then there's handling of whitespace, which is a notorious issue in XML processing. It's not much of a problem when doing XML-to-XML or XML-to-HTML conversion, but it is a big and ugly PITA when doing the XML-to-text conversion that's needed for generating *roff output from DocBook source. The are some other challenges -- like how to handle things like footnotes and hyperlinks in *roff output -- but those are fun in comparison. > In fact, consensus among the world's DocBook mavens was that this was > impossible to pull off -- before I, er, did it. It required an unusual > combination of advanced compiler-jockery, familiarity with certain AI > techniques, and sheer bloody-minded persistence. I'm not sure if I'm a DocBook maven but I will admit that I was among those that didn't think it could be done well. But I have to say now that I think doclifter is a mighty piece of work indeed. --Mike -- Michael(tm) Smith http://www.w3.org/People/Smith/ _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
