On Sat, Dec 15, 2007, Robert Thorsby wrote:
On 15/12/07 04:25:40, Michael Kerpan wrote:
...that groff/troff seems to be written
off by so many as "obsolete" ...
IMO it is all a matter of perceptions. People think that a 30 year
old application that, even today, does not have a GUI **must** be
obsolete.
So true. I get the feeling, when explaining the clear advantages of
*roff (or TeX, for that matter) to people raised in "gotta-be-GUI",
that they think I'm trying to convince them the Victrola is superior
to the iPod.
Add to this, *roff does not conform to The Debian Way (which
includes derivatives, such as *buntu).
After so many years, I still don't quite grasp what The Debian Way
is, and why that works against groff. Especially since I have never
run any GNU/Linux distro other than Debian, and have used groff
exclusively for all my document needs (groff built from source, of
course).
There are no modern textbooks on *roff. The three I have are
about 20 years old. How many people are aware of the accompanying
documentation to Peter's mom macros?
If someone could figure out a way to get funding for writing a
modern text on *roff, I'd take on the project in a heartbeat. I've
done what I can to make the documentation for mom an advertisement
for groff, but it will never be enough. A thoroughly edited, hard
copy textbook on *roff is what's needed.
Finally, we are our own worst enemies. Those who inhabit this
list, though incredibly polite and invariably helpful to newbies,
are always posting about arcane subjects.
Big laugh over this, since both halves of the statement are so
true.
Today, I use groff for everything, including business letters.
This gets me thinking. *roff has always appeared horribly
intimidating since so much of the available documentation suggests
it's primarily for creating scientific/mathematical/technical
documents, leading average janes-joes to conclude it's too unwieldy
for simpler tasks.
If one were wanting to do some serious *roff advocacy, one would
need to emphasize *roff's usefulness for basic document needs (e.g.
business letters) first, so that users attracted to *roff's way
of doing things could then undertake the sort of exploration that
begins with the question: "Gee--I wonder if *roff can do <fill in
the blank for an advanced task>, too?"
Years ago, I got a copy of the O'Reilly book, _Running Linux._ In
the chapter on text processing, which dealt with *roff and TeX, the
TeX section gave detailed instructions for writing a business letter
using LaTeX; tellingly, the *roff section gave only instructions for
writing a manpage.