path: root/src/devices/grohtml-old/TODO

------------------------------------------------------------------
                       T O   D O   L I S T
------------------------------------------------------------------
finish working out the max and min x, y, extents for splines.
------------------------------------------------------------------
check and test thoroughly all the character descriptions in devhtml
(originally taken from devX100)
------------------------------------------------------------------
improve tmac.arkup
------------------------------------------------------------------
also improve documentation.
------------------------------------------------------------------
fix the bugs which are exposed by Eric Raymonds pic guide,
"Making Pictures With GNU PIC". It appears that grohtml becomes confused
about which sections of the document are text and which sections need
to be rendered as an image.
------------------------------------------------------------------
it would be nice to modularise the source. A natural division might be
to extract the table handling code from html.cc into table.cc.
The table.cc could be expanded to recognise output from tbl and try
and generate html tables with lines/rules/boxes. The code as it stands
should cope with very simple plain text tables. But of course at present
it does not get a chance to do this because the output of gtbl is
bracketed by \fCgraphic-start\fR and \fCgraphic-end\fR.
------------------------------------------------------------------
introduce anti aliasing for the images as mentioned by Werner.
------------------------------------------------------------------
improve generation of html. Perhaps by using a stack of current
html commands and using a kind of peephole optimizer on the stack?
Certainly the html should be buffered and optimized.
------------------------------------------------------------------


Informal to do bug list and done list
=====================================

This very informal and I've included some comments. Mainly consists
of a emailed bugs and wish lists. All very useful and welcome.

------------------------------------------------------------------
Dean writes: (provinsd@enf403-2.ensu.ucalgary.ca)

I noticed also that the TOC appears immediately after the title, splitting
it from the author and abstract.  Any chance it can be moved down?

gaius> this should be straight forward. (Not done yet though)
------------------------------------------------------------------

.) The command `\(->', translates to the `registered' sign (or rather
   the character `0xAE') instead of a right arrow.

--nearly fixed-- 4/01/2000

gaius>   if we know the standard html character encoding for farrow which
gaius>   will work on *all* browsers then this can be fixed inside devhtml/TR
gaius>   etc. Otherwise I guess we could translate this character into ->
gaius>   in tmac.html ?

------------------------------------------------------------------

Werner writes:

Nevertheless, still some bugs in it.  As usual, I'm refering to man.1
of the mandb package; my command to create man.html was

  groff -U -t -man -Thtml -P-r -P200 man.1 > man.html

.) The `-w , --where, --location' node at the beginning of man.html
   shouldn't be there at all.

> .) Some paragraphs still contain hyphenated words (e.g. first
>    paragraph of the `DESCRIPTION' section).

Oops!  Please ignore this.  I forgot to include `-mhtml' :-)

.) Is it possible to have anti-aliased PNG images?

.) The item `man --help' in the `EXAMPLES' section doesn't start a new
   paragraph.

.) In the description of the -r switch (in the `OPTIONS' section),
   there is a new paragraph in the middle of a sentence.

.) What about centering the images?  Or does it depend on the table
   itself?

gaius> yes, grohtml places images at their relative position on the page.

.) In the `OPTIONS' section, `-c, --catman' and `-d, --debug' are
   glued together which shouldn't happen.
--fixed--

.) Sometimes, an empty line is missing between items, e.g. between the
   description of the -e and the -f options.

.) After the `-w, --where, --location' line, there is a superfluous
   empty line.

.) The indentation in the `FILES' section is inconsistent.  The same
   is true for `-V, --version' a few lines above.

.) The formatting of the paragraph after the first table is completely
   wrong.  It appears that the first few words are set in two columns;
   additionally, the indentation is incorrect.

.) Similarly, the description of `-l' in the OPTIONS section is
   idented incorrectly.  Wrong indentations happen still quite
   frequently.

.) In the description of the `-D' option, there is a blank line in the
   middle of a paragraph.


     Werner

------------------------------------------------------------------
Werner writes:

Gaius,

checking a weird man page written by myself in German (using German
hyphenation patterns also :-), I found some more bugs:

.) Look at the following:
 
[\c
...\^\c
] 
[\c
.BI -P \ \%Plattform-ID\^\c
]

   This translates to

[<font size=3><B>-E</B> <font size=3><I>Kodierungs-ID</I> <font size=3>]
                                                         ^
   (groff breaks the line after the final `]'.)

   There are two errors in it: First of all, the `\ ' command should
   be translated to `&nbsp;'.  Secondly, a blank has crept in (marked
   with `^'.  Apparently, this is related to whether it is the last
   item of a line or not.

--fixed-- 4 01 2000
------------------------------------------------------------------

from Steve Blinkhorn <steve@prd.co.uk>

One thought that came immediately to mind after our first trials.
If grohtml depends on grops, should there not be an easy interface to
allow PostScript code to be interpreted into the output?   For
instance, we generate our letterhead, including a logo, on the fly in
groff.   The logo is pure PostScript.   We use PostScript for colour
manipulation, and recently for generating a lot of graphics for
printing.

gaius>  should be interesting - if we can generate PS then GS it
gaius>  we should be in business

------------------------------------------------------------------
                        D O N E   L I S T
------------------------------------------------------------------
the logical place and name for a file describing tmac.arkup is
groff_markup.man placed into the `tmac' subdirectory, and your html.ms
looks like being this kind of file.

So I won't check it in currently -- may I ask you to convert this file
to a man page?

-- fixed --

Another related problem: I can imagine that a lot of people start to
write man pages with HTML output in mind also.  Nevertheless, it
should be still possible to display such pages correctly with a plain
text man pager.  As a consequence, such man pages should contain at
the beginning something like

  .do mso tmac.arkup

What do you think?

    Werner

-- fixed -- 
gaius> fixed by using troffrc-end I believe
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Gaius,

in troffrc, it appears to me that tmac.html is loaded if the output
device is HTML.  So why must I load it again (using -mhtml) to
suppress hyphenation for HTML output?  Can you provide a fix for this?

    Werner

gaius> fixed as above
--------------------------------------------------------------------

from (daeschler@shuttle.de) Rainer Daeschler

I recognized s problem limiting the usage for 
"none-english aliens". The generation of PNG of GIF,
skips all special characters like

      äöü ÄÖÜ ß

French, Spanish, and Scandinavian national letters, too.

--fixed-- 14/01/2000

An option which forces tables into HTML-code instead of building
an image would be most valuable. Of course it would not preserve
the original layout in many cases, but ease modifications of
the HTML-output to the users demand afterwards.

--fixed-- 14/01/2000

gaius> use the new -T option to grohtml (-P-T to groff)

-----------------------------------------------------------------
from Werner

   but `pre-defined' appears as `pre&shy; line' (note the space
   character after the soft hyphen).  Something in the code makes
   problems here...

   (IIRC, I've sent you this man.1 file a few weeks ago).

gaius> Werner fixed this by adding .cflags 0 -\(hy\(em\(en to tmac.html

-----------------------------------------------------------------
from Werner and Eddie
> > > .LP
> > > .URL Germany "ftp://groff.ffii.org/pub/groff/"
> > > |
> > > .URL USA "ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/groff/"
> > 
> > Problem: the first "|" of each line is missing a leading white space
> > space.
> > 
> > How to ensure the spaces get put there?
> 
> This is a feature grohtml (unfortunately -- AFAIK, Gaius hasn't found
> a good workaround yet).  HTML stuff gets written as specials which
> don't consume space for troff, causing some miscalculation if placed
> at the beginning of a paragraph.  A workaround is to write
> 
> .LP
> \&
> .URL ...
> |
> .URL ...

gaius> fixed by adding \& to HTML as per Werner's suggestion


Werner writes:

PNGs created by grohtml have apparently a white background -- isn't it
possible to make the background transparent optionally?

Another suggestion: What do you think about calling the PNG files
<groff_input_file>-<index>.png or something like this?  I can't see an
advantage in the current naming scheme except for debugging purposes
where it may be necessary to stay with the old files.

--fixed-- 04 01 2000

gaius> however I've had to retain a default grohtml-pid-index.png for all
gaius> stdin as we don't know the filename.. sadly looks like everything..
gaius> Nearly done by including a new tcommand 'F filename'

--fixed-- 26 01 2000
------------------------------------------------------------------

.) The following code produces ugly results -- is it possible to make
   the HTML result similar to the ascii output?

.in +4m
.ta 3iC
.I "Plattform	Plattform-ID (pid)"
\&.sp
.ta 3iR
Apple Unicode	0
.br
Macintosh	1
.br
ISO	2
.br
Microsoft	3
.PP

--fixed--  14/01/2000
------------------------------------------------------------------