[TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Jon Steinhart]

arnold at skeeve.com writes:
> The DocBook conversion make it easy for them to generate HTML so
> that books could be put on CD and browsed with a web browser.
> I believe that was the main motivation.

Having been through this sort of stuff fairly recently, I wrote a
short script that converted my troff macros into OpenOffice XML
format because my publisher wanted Word.  As I think I mentioned
earlier, I also had a script that converted pic into SVG so that
it could be included in Word docs.  There were two difficulties.
First, while I could have SVG pics, I had to insert them into the
doc manually, couldn't figure how to do that in the XML.  Second
was that I ended up sending PDFs of the tables to one of the layout
people as I couldn't come up with a decent way to convert those.
An interesting aspect of this is that I grew up on the simple layout
that was easy to do in tbl which is hard to do in Word as its tables
are overly gaudy.

The big thing missing from *roff from a publishing point of view is
a good way to make comments and respond to them.  Kind of a must-have
when working with human (not text) editors.

Jon