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[Groff] UTP ducoment translation, bloatware, and MS Offfice


From: Richard Loken
Subject: [Groff] UTP ducoment translation, bloatware, and MS Offfice
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2002 13:37:38 -0600 (MDT)

I am reading the strangest things on this list today and I will cite them
out of context and without credit,

        "new material should not be written in troff"
        "disk is $1.00 a gigabyte and any CPU under 1.3GHz is obselete"
        "[re: mm docs] if you MS Office see..."

Say what?  And why are you saying it?

Why would I want an up to date troff documentation package if I am not writing
troff docs?  Why would I want to read these documents in HTML or PDF or Word
if I am writing troff docs?  Why do I want "feature rich" bloatware and why
do I want to buy the latest 1.3GHz Intel box so I can run it?

I can buy a 1.3G Windoze box with a copy of Office 2000whatever year it is now
within a four block walk of my house.  All of us can.  If we wanted to run
Bill's bloatware we would have filled up the basement with 1.3G luxobarges
already and this whole conversation would not be taking place.

Bloatware.  Not one person in 20 requires the "features" in the original
verion of MS Word and that means that they sure don't nead all the added
resource gobbling "features" in the infinite supply of updates that have 
followed it.

So why do you think you need to add more bloat?  Bloat is already available
in great abundance.  Forget bloat and get back to providing a usable resource.

I use troff because I can write what I want to write very quickly and I
can make major modifications in style and/or format in a fraction of the
time that a WYSIWYG word processor can do it.  My wife and my daughter write
their university papers in troff, they write them fast and check them fast
and life goes on.  All of this with a 75MHz Pentium and a Deskjet 500 and why
not?  They both work just fine and I got them for free from some ugrading 
Windows victem.

If somebody is so geeky that they want a PDF document then I grind it through 
Ghostscript and send them PDF.  HTML?  Whafor?  It looks fancy and it can sort
of be searched by I like my docs on paper where I can use highlighters and 
scribble notes and I also find it easier to skim through paper docs looking 
for something when I don't know what I am looking for.  HTML man pages?  That
illness is spreading through the Linux community at a horrific pace, why not
read man pages with man?  Man provides page numbers at least.

I have a friend who thinks the only way to write docs is with Scribe because
that is what he learned on in the CP/M days.  I have another friend who wants
me to write some device drivers for ditroff under FreeBSD because he thinks
only pure Unix belongs in FreeBSD and Groff has strayed too far from the
path.

I never agreed with them until today.
---
   Richard Loken VE6BSV, Systems Programmer - VMS  
   Athabasca University
   Athabasca, Alberta Canada
   ** address@hidden **



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