Hi Steve, Steve Litt wrote on Tue, Nov 05, 2019 at 06:38:52PM -0500: > On Tue, 5 Nov 2019 18:38:03 +0100 > Ingo Schwarze wrote: >> Andrew wrote on Sun, Nov 03, 2019 at 12:56:58PM +0000:
>> [ Pandoc ] >>> is one of the most useful tools I have ever used. If you are >>> writing any sort of documentation then I *highly* recommend >>> checking it out >> I strongly oppose that point. Admittedly, this was a bit of a diversion because the OP asked about long, general-purpose texts like books - but all the same, it didn't want to let the statement "pandoc is recommended for *documentation*" go unchallenged. [ mdoc(7) ] > no method of creating a header hierarchy like <h1>...<h6> > I'd suspect it could be done by nesting .Sh lines, No, .Sh does not nest at all. > no way to declare arbitrary styles. > can't make new kinds of lists That's all perfectly true. The mdoc(7) macro set serves a very narrow domain: documentation, i.e. manual pages. It's intentionally neither configurable nor extensible. The goal is to enforce a uniform style on manual pages, optimized for simplicity, conciseness, and clarity, but without manual page authors having to worry about the styling at all, in fact not even allowing authors to mess with that uniform style of manual pages, such that all pages follow the same conventions and readers can quickly become familiar with these conventions. > If I'm wrong, I might start writing my books in mdoc(7). Please don't even try. Writing a book in mdoc(7) is completely impossible for lots and lots of reasons. For a book, i guess that the groff_mom(7) macro set might be useful. Yours, Ingo
