Re: Heirloom Troff for NetBSD (was: Removing ARCNET stuffs)

[David Young <dyoung%pobox.com@localhost>]

On Tue, Jun 09, 2015 at 10:58:04AM -0400, Mouse wrote:
> > I'm arguing that
> 
> > 	.B here
> 
> > is better than
> 
> > 	<b>here</b>
> 
> > because that ratio is 3/4 (counting the space after ".B") versus 7/4.
> > IOW, troff supports the tersest markup language.  And that's a good
> > thing because it minimizes the author's work.
> 
> Only if (a) you measure `work' in nothing but keystrokes and (b) if the
> author types the markup directly.
> 
> Neither of those is obviously true to me.  In my experience, (a) is
> definitely false but (b) is mostly true, the latter largely, I suspect,
> an artifact of the kind of workflow I handle well.  (I've heard of GUI
> tools for building HTML - my memory hands me the name Dreamweaver -
> which make (b) very false and make it hard to compare work levels since
> the user gestures involved are so very different.)

I'm glad somebody wrote "Dreamweaver".

I have to say that I don't really care what markup language NetBSD
documentation is/was/will be written in, I probably don't want to deal
with it.  I just want to type the words of my document, tweak some
words' style and/or functional role (possibly by selecting from a
context menu), and see all of the typing/tweaking reflected instantly,
with high fidelity to the appearance of a finished document, at the
place where I typed/tweaked.  Starting dot commands on the first column,
or closing tags that were opened, should happen behind the scenes.

Dave

-- 
David Young
dyoung%pobox.com@localhost    Urbana, IL    (217) 721-9981