Hi John, John Gardner wrote on Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 02:33:25AM +1100:
> I really do wish Mandoc would support the Troff intermediate > output format. I just had a brief look again at your message "Formal AST output in mandoc" from January 16, and the ensuing thread, to refresh my memory. IIUC, you are working on a JavaScript program in the context of some gigantic heavy-weight framework to render manual pages in real time on a canvas while an author is editing them. Corrrect me if i got that wrong... If groff is installed on the system, taking groff_out(5) as the input format for your program looks like a possible choice. On a system where you use mandoc(1) for rendering, you should really use the mandoc -Thtml output as your input format. Mandoc PDF output is just not good enough for anything except casual human viewing, in particular nor for automated postprocessing. Even if a -Tgroff output mode were written, it seems to me you would still be better off using -Thtml rather than -Tgroff because in -Tgroff, all the information about semantic functions (class attributes in HTML parlance) would be lost. Even if i'm overlooking something and -Tgroff would be better for your particular purpose (if so, why?), and even if you were to write the -Tgroff output mode, i would hesitate to include it; it seems too much of a niche application to warrant the resulting maintenance effort: i fail to imagine any other use case where -Tgroff might help... > Even if processing text piped between programs isn't nearly as > efficient as reading it from a compiled program, it's so much > more flexible. I'm not sure i get the point here. You certainly don't want to compile the mandoc parser and directly link your program to it because the syntax tree structs are not stable, but constantly evolving. Besides, pipes do seem quite efficient to me - you aren't really worried about the copyin/copyout overhead in the kernel, or are you? Can't really believe that's what you are trying to say while on the other hand you are using monstrous frameworks like electron/atom/js/whatever... So to me, the question doesn't seem to be efficiency of pipes vs. direct memory access, but rather which communication format to use: HTML, UTF-8 text, PostScript in order of decreasing mandoc output quality, and -Tgroff only if there are strong arguments that i haven't heard or understood yet. Yours, Ingo
