Re: [Groff] Replacing groff with troff?

[Deri James]

On Wednesday 02 June 2010 03:04:47 Larry Kollar wrote:
>  > It runs slowly
> 
> And that statement pretty much casts everything else you say into  
> question. "Runs slowly" compared to what? I haven't found any general- 
> purpose formatter that even comes close to groff, speed-wise, and  
> don't get me started on GUI tools. Some Unix deployments had a  
> "catman" directory with pre-formatted (ASCII) manpages... but are  
> there really general-use systems out there these days that are so  
> slow, even the overhead for processing a manpage is too much to bear?  
> Embedded systems, sure, but who's reading manpages on them?

Groff is simply amazingly fast at producing print output. For volume print 
runs there is nothing to touch it. It is used regularly in 2-3 million page 
runs (which takes 36hrs, and that includes a double pass to generate a 
Contents page for each booklet, distilling the postscript into pdfs, and 
generating the original troff source files prior to running groff).

Each booklet is individual (i.e. customised content) is full colour, contains 
several different reports, and includes pie-charts and graphs (using troffs 
drawing commands). I don't know of any system which comes close, it has been 
estimated that 'Actuate', a market leader in this area, would take over 60 
days to produce this same volume of documents, running on the same hardware.

I am always in awe of its capability and speed.

Cheers

Deri