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Re: [Groff] groff v. TeX


From: D. E. Evans
Subject: Re: [Groff] groff v. TeX
Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 12:26:01 -0400

   > and which, if either would be most suitable for producing a
   > magazine?

   This is difficult to say.  In case you use, say, three columns a page,
   I suggest TeX due to its better paragraph formatting capabilities.  If
   you need a plain-text output also, then roff is probably the better
   choice.

I see much of this as a matter of style, too.  Do you use emacs or vi/ed?
We vi and ed users are so used to the UNIX mentality of doing things
that learning emacs is like an assault on UNIX.  ed only takes a single
character for a command, is fast and efficient, and once you learn the
code sequences, it is so easy and fast to use, whereas emacs is much more
intuitive (at least for the time).  I think TeX and roff are that way.
What is interesting is that I learned TeX first, but when I started
using groff, I already knew some of the parlance because of my use of
UNIX (such as BSD, Xenix, or Sun), and it fit right into that mold,
and seemed to gel easier with the other UNIX tools.

That's a bit of a biased perspective, but whether you use roff, or TeX,
can depend as much on style and familiarity as it can the strengths and
weaknesses of both.  I've got so I like groff because it fits my UNIX
way of thinking, but still use TeX because it has options that I find
easier that groff.





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