Re: [Groff] gropdf and pdfroff

[Clarke Echols]

On 07/29/2011 06:10 PM, Anton Shepelev wrote:
> Mike Bianchi:
>
> > [...]   To  do even the simplest document requires
> > much-too-much expertise for the rank beginner.
> >
> > What is missing is a Front  Door  that  leads  you
> > gently  into  the  Castle,  teaches  you  the  way
> > through the rooms, closets and  pantries,  so  you
> > can  live  comfortably there with what is present.
> > Then (and only then) should you be led  down  into
> > the  basement  and  shown how the electric, water,
> > heat  and  sewage  utilities  work.   Finally  you
> > should  go  into  the  workshop and start building
> > your own mechanisms.
>
> This approach to learning Groff would only  work  if
> there  were  a simple, high-level and self-contained
> set of macros that would hide the underlying  mecha-
> nisms  perfectly  well, sparing the user the need to
> intefere with the low-level stuff. This would  be  a
> full  new layer on top of Groff, like LaTeX is built
> on top of TeX and may be used without ever resorting
> to  TeX.  Besides,  this  is  like applying theorems
> without understanding their proofs.
>
>  From my own experince,  the  existing  packages  are
> much  stronger coupled with Groff and cannot be used
> without good understanding of Groff itself. I didn't
> try mom though.
>
> What  I  was missing the most in the beginning was a
> Groff tutorial that  would  deliver  information  in
> learning  order,  as  opposed to reference order, as
> the info manual does.
>
> Anton

I was working on a troff/nroff tutorial at HP back in
1988, but got pulled off of it to handle the HP-UX
Reference (man pages) for four years.  The version that
got produced was a cut-down version for nroff only,
and it never hit the bookstore market like the vi
manual I wrote in 1987 that went to trade press in 1990.

My advice for learning troff/groff is to take an uncommented
macro package, add comprehensive comments about how every
line works, and what it does.

Do that, and you'll have a lot of understanding that's
hard to get otherwise.

A good *roff tutorial that starts with basic page layout,
margins, indents, etc., then moves on to headlines, and
other "ordinary" stuff would be an excellent resource.

Then move on to more advanced techniques, writing macros,
etc.

Lots of work.

But in a world of idiots using Microsoft Word while
thinking it's great software, it could be an uphill
battle.

When my clients insist that my work be in Word, I add
25% to my fee.  I prefer giving them a PostScript file
or a PDF.

Clarke