Re: [Tools-discuss] Let's have better tools

[John R Levine <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, 27 Jun 2021, Andrew G. Malis wrote:
> But what would be really cool would be something similar to
> what we had with nroffedit - you just type what needs to be written, and
> the tool makes it look nice in real time. and then generates what's needed
> to be submitted to the process in the syntax of the day.

You and me both.  There's a variety of ways we might do that.

There are commercial XML editors like that, you edit a roughly formatted 
version of the document and it writes out the XML.  They're unlikely to be 
useful to us for several reasons.  One is that our XML turns out to be 
quite unlike everyone else's XML so people who've tried the editors say 
they don't work well with our grammar.  Also, they're expensive, and I 
doubt many ietfers would want to install and learn the quirks of yet 
another editor.

Another possibility is some MS Word stylesheets and macros and a
converter between docx and xml2rfc.  A lot of people like Word, and I 
think it would not be too hard to come up with a set of styles that could 
be reliably converted to xml2rfc.  I realize a lot of people don't like 
Word, but at least it's not a new program to learn.

There are a lot of markdown editors, some of which are browser apps, some 
of which are separate programs. I haven't looked to see if any of them 
might be suitable to adapt.

Regards,
John Levine, [e-mail], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly