> Kristaps Dzonsons <krist...@bsd.lv> wrote:
>
> Hello groffers,
>
> I have a survey question regarding -ms and -mpdfmark documents. …
>
> To wit, I
> wonder if anybody who uses -ms and -mpdfmark has any suggestions on
> settings to improve the legibility of produced documents.
I used ms + pdfmark extensively until a few years ago, when work moved all of
us to a content management system (not a very good one, mind you). Personally,
I think everyone does what I did — adds their own extensions to -ms to get more
control over the output. Sort of like all the variants of Markdown, except that
Markdown variants are usually documented somewhere public. :-P
But I digress. If you can package your parameter settings and extensions into
one file, you just need an “.so extensions.t" at the beginning of your groff
output.
Lowdown looks pretty useful, but I’m a little concerned about the Markdown-hate
in the documentation. I use this workflow to produce my fiction books:
MultiMarkdown -> XHTML -> EPUB -> (AZW)[1]
\
XSLT -> *roff -> PDF
One common theme among Markdown variants, they all produce cleaner HTML than
I’ve seen from any other tool (except for hand-coded). Piping the output
through “tidy -asxhtml -utf8 -numeric” lets it sail right through xsltproc
without a hiccup. I’m using *roff (neatroff at the moment, because its output
is noticeably more beautiful) instead of XSL:FO for a couple reasons:
1) *roff lets me stick my fingers into the output and even up the bottom margin
on each page. I don’t think any of the FO formatters can do that.
2) XSL:FO is tedious as (use the four-letter word you prefer). I wrote a
transform just to try it, and it works, but jeez. Set a handful of parameters
in -ms, add a few extensions as needed, and let it do the work.
Larry
[1] Amazon converts a submitted EPUB to AZW format for the Kindle. On my end, I
only have to worry about EPUB, which is XHTML with a few control files. So the
same XHTML provides both EPUB and PDF.
