Re: [Groff] groff as a backend

[Pete Phillips]

>>>>> "Larry" == Larry Kollar <address@hidden> writes:
    Larry>  But the Unix Text Processing book is now available
    Larry> online (see my .signature); 
    Larry> Processing: "UTP Revival" http://home.alltel.net/kollar/utp/

Fantastic!  I have an original copy of this book - dogeared, but fully
functioning, it has been our bible (along with the two Gehani books) for
nearly two decades. It was invaluable in getting our Convergent
Technology 68010 multiuser box to print publication quality documents on
our Apple Laswerwriter back in 1986/7.

(As an interesting aside, when we decommisioned that box in the late
1980's/early 90's, it was picked up by a couple of guys from the Swansea
University computing club - one of whom was a certain Mr A. Cox! They
gave me a bottle of wine for going in on a Saturday too).

Larry> There was a time where commercial troff was not easily available due
Larry> to expense, and GNU troff was not yet extant. During that time, TeX was
Larry> free and freely available, so that's where the community moved. Inertia
Larry> has kept them there. 

Oddly enough, we started off with AT&T, followed by Softquad (you're
right Larry, it wasn't cheap - I think we paid around a grand for it in
87/88), followed by groff, and stuck with it until recently. Our move to
Latex has mainly been due to the ease of use issue with Lyx as a front
end, and the availability of plenty of latex packages to support, for
example, RCS, slide generation with prosper etc.  I think we will
eventually end up with a mixed economy - groff for SOP's, test methods
(we have hundreds of these so are not about to start coonverting them
anytime soon) and database backends (groff is fantastic for
interspersing with SQL in shell scripts), and LyX/LaTeX for report
writing and correspondence).

Great to see this book getting a new lease of life.  Don't know how I
missed hearing about it, but it's made my day. 

Pete
--
Pete Phillips, Acting Director,     |   http://www.smtl.co.uk/
Surgical Materials Testing Lab,     |   http://www.worldwidewounds.com/
Princess of Wales Hospital, S Wales | 
Tel/Fax: +44 1656-752820/30         |   address@hidden


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