Ah! A very interesting read. Seconding the use of goyo... I really need to get back into writing, there really is SO much to learn about it — it's really easy to get obsessed with doing things the Right™ way, too.
One of my favourite quotes about doing anything artistic comes from the writer Brandon Sanderson, which I'll copy from my handwritten transcript:
"Suddenly your baby is ugly, and it's worse than that, because the baby was perfect in your mind, and then you made it ugly through your hands being unable to accomplish what you want. Very dangerous to new artists, your skill isn't up to your aspirations yet. You need to learn that the product of art isn't the art, it's you, as an artist. The time you spend will change you. It will make you better at expressing your ideas — you'll have a wonderful time."
I did a lot of writing in Groff for fun a while ago (although I actually much prefer the mandoc language that's manpage-specific but is much more semantic), it led to me creating my "Gemroff" markup language that I use in my website's static site generator lol https://sr.ht/~nytpu/gemroff/
I'm almost certainly the only person using it so not surprising haha (although I do know one or two people used the tool to convert the Gemini protocol's Gemtext to HTML since it also supports that, as Gemroff is a sorta-superset of Gemtext).
The other benefit is that troff/groff is forever. I recently ran the 1979 troff input for Brian Kernighan's "UNIX for Beginners - Second Edition" paper through groff. It worked, I got a nice, printable PDF out of groff.
groff has very confusing syntax to me, but it looks like it'd be fun to mess with for a similar project. with the AO3 downtime, i'd love to experiment with markup languages other than HTML and markdown for formatting and publishing fanfic. i think it'd be fun.
alexandria | a day ago
Ah! A very interesting read. Seconding the use of goyo... I really need to get back into writing, there really is SO much to learn about it — it's really easy to get obsessed with doing things the Right™ way, too.
One of my favourite quotes about doing anything artistic comes from the writer Brandon Sanderson, which I'll copy from my handwritten transcript:
nytpu | 19 hours ago
I did a lot of writing in Groff for fun a while ago (although I actually much prefer the mandoc language that's manpage-specific but is much more semantic), it led to me creating my "Gemroff" markup language that I use in my website's static site generator lol https://sr.ht/~nytpu/gemroff/
jaredkrinke | 15 hours ago
Any example Gemroff files you can point to? I looked around a bit and couldn’t find one.
nytpu | 13 hours ago
I'm almost certainly the only person using it so not surprising haha (although I do know one or two people used the tool to convert the Gemini protocol's Gemtext to HTML since it also supports that, as Gemroff is a sorta-superset of Gemtext).
But the source file for this blog post of mine is here: https://git.sr.ht/~nytpu/nytpu.com/tree/master/item/src/gemlog/2025-12-21.gr , and a ton of other Gemroff files in that tree too: https://git.sr.ht/~nytpu/nytpu.com/tree/master/item/src/gemlog (my website does use YAML frontmatter, that's not normal Gemroff)
bediger4000 | 20 hours ago
The other benefit is that troff/groff is forever. I recently ran the 1979 troff input for Brian Kernighan's "UNIX for Beginners - Second Edition" paper through groff. It worked, I got a nice, printable PDF out of groff.
girlonthemoon | 21 hours ago
groff has very confusing syntax to me, but it looks like it'd be fun to mess with for a similar project. with the AO3 downtime, i'd love to experiment with markup languages other than HTML and markdown for formatting and publishing fanfic. i think it'd be fun.