Well said, James. Fully agreed on all points. > A convenient GUI viewer -- with hyperlinks and proportional fonts -- > would "advertise" groff and cement its position as the best free > documenation system there is, bar none.
I started work on such a thing. Basically, it's an Electron-based front-end for Roff.js <https://github.com/Alhadis/Roff.js> to enable live-reloading of edited Roff documents, hyperlinked cross-references (both in nroff(1) and troff(1)-emulated output), and a bunch of other spiffy-looking crap like translucency and mupdf-style page-navigation. It was designed to be eye candy for people who don't read man pages because they're "ugly" and "outdated". People might think differently if they see high-quality typeset manuals instead of 4-font monospaced TTY output… :-) On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 at 23:54, James K. Lowden <jklow...@schemamania.org> wrote: > On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 03:08:04 +1000 > "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > At 2020-06-14T14:40:44+1000, John Gardner wrote: > > > Why are we using Info, again? Was it because of GNU policy? > > > > Yes. https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#GNU-Manuals > > > > Aside from the mandate of the source document format, I find the > > advice there fairly sound, as far as it goes. > > I don't think the "mandate" has any force. What are they going to do, > kick us out? > > I suggest we drop texinfo when the same output can be produced with > groff. That means HTML and, if you ask me, a better viewer than GNU > less(1). > > Texinfo was invented to replace man pages. groff was invented to > (among other things) preserve them. I guess we could call that > "philosophical tension". > > Of the two, I'd say groff has been far more successful, whether you > count documents or pages or users. > > (Strangely enough, my Ubuntu system lacks a texinfo file for texinfo. > "info texinfo" turns up a ... man page.) > > The in-terminal experience of info files is about as bad as it gets. > The info reader's sole strength is links, especially index links. The > UI is otherwise hideous. I don't think there's a better word for it. > > texinfo is therefore -- even in that document's own estimation -- best > treated as a source format, as a markup language. On that basis, how is > it superior to groff? > > texinfo produces better HTML. Unlike man and mdoc, texinfo has > hyperlinks and floating displays. groff has the advantage at the > command line, which is why (I suppose) bash dropped info in favor of a > man page. > > For our purposes, texinfo will be obsolete the day groff documentation > in HTML is of similar quality to that produced by texinfo. IMHO, GNU > has no reason to object, given groff's inherent purpose as a project. > > Beyond that, I have long thought that, as a matter of perception and > acceptance, the one thing holding groff back is how man pages are > typically viewed, i.e., though nroff and the pager. Nothing says 1980 > like a monospaced font on a VT-100, where the mouse becomes inert and > cross references have to be typed in. > > There is no GUI application specialized for viewing man pages. There > is ditroff and xman; there are PDF viewers and web browsers. But > there's nothing so quick as "man foo" to bring up a man page. That's > why man(1) has endured, and why decades-long efforts to replace it > have failed. > > A convenient GUI viewer -- with hyperlinks and proportional fonts -- > would "advertise" groff and cement its position as the best free > documenation system there is, bar none. > > --jkl > > > >
