On Wed, 30 Jun 1999, Chris Maden wrote:

> [Sebastian Rahtz]
> > Chuck Robey writes:
> >  > Troff (or groff, actually) is still being used to write books.
> >  > That's too bad,
> > 
> > why is that bad? what is wrong with using a high-quality, flexible,
> > stable tool for the job?
> 
> Because doing anything but printing with it is a nightmare.  For the
> forthcoming _Perl CD Bookshelf_ we had _Programming Perl_ in SGML; it
> went on-line easily.  We had four books in Frame, relatively well-
> tagged; we saved them as XML and then processed them into DocBook with
> Perl.  Pretty easy.  _Perl in a Nutshell_ was in troff, and took more
> time to convert for on-line use than the other books put together.

Amen, took the words right out of my mouth.  What's needed is a method
that describes the markup in a way not too terribly more complicated
than it is now, but is standardized so that moving it to a different
format isn't such an adventure.

And we should not need to have 4 years of retraining to do this.

> 
> Yuck.
> 
> -Chris
> -- 
> <!NOTATION SGML.Geek PUBLIC "-//Anonymous//NOTATION SGML Geek//EN">
> <!ENTITY crism PUBLIC "-//O'Reilly//NONSGML Christopher R. Maden//EN"
> "<URL>http://www.oreilly.com/people/staff/crism/ <TEL>+1.617.499.7487
> <USMAIL>90 Sherman Street, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA" NDATA SGML.Geek>
> 
> 
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
> 

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