Re: Readability of troff documents (Was: [Groff] Bug in gxditview)

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Fri May 23 08:41:56 2003, address@hidden wrote:
...
> Is there a way (other than preprocessing through some sed
> filter) of inserting these the way they're inserted in
> LaTeX? Ie:
> 
> em dash is ---
> en dash is --
> 
> I find that \(em and \(en (and other similar codes)
> seriously reduce the readability of the _source_ document,

They are annoying, but I've learned to live with them, provided I have a
color-coding text editor (vim, emacs, etc).
If you can manage to put the em dashes at the end of lines\(em\
like this\(em\
it's almost readable.  Or maybe I'm brain-damaged.

But I agree that good LaTeX usually is more readable than good troff.

> as well as increase the knowledge level required to create
> documents in troff. It shouldn't be hard to explain to a
> non-computer person that a dash meant as punctuation should
> be entered as ---, but trying to explain \(em?

On the other hand, most people (including most programmers!) haven't noticed
that there *are* different kinds of dashes and other vertical line thingies.
If they read up on the subject I think they'll find that the terminology
maps pretty well to groff's syntax.

/Jörgen

-- 
  // Jörgen Grahn       "And then the design was ignored, and small children
\X/ <address@hidden>  with crayons were given the O'Reilly Perl books and
                         told to Create.  And lo, it was done."
                                                         -- Teo de H, in ASR