Re: [Groff] Macro Packages

[Grigoriy A. Sitkarev]

Let me please express my opinion and share experience.

I  am  not  a long‐time groff user, but I use it exclusively
for about two years to typeset my papers and short booklets.
There  are  people  here  in the list who have used original
troff when I wasn’t born yet.  Some of them participated  in
the development of the Unix operating system and contributed
alot to it.  I wasn’t going to babble in this thread,  since
I  am  not active in the list and I do not consider my point
of view valuable to be  worth  of  posting,  but  the  topic
raised is close to my past and I want to share some thoughts
with the people here.

I tried  a  number  of  typesetting  systems  before  I  got
acquainted with groff.  Many of them did the job well, LaTeX
is an amazing piece of software, no  doubts.   But  none  of
them  gave me a feeling of typesetting.  Probably, I am sim‐
plifying it too much, but isn’t typesetting is just a place‐
ment  of  glyphs,  figures  and special symbols at the right
places?  I wanted to do typesetting, not markup, like  I  am
sitting  in front of a letter board.  With groff I can do it
in the way I like, if I feel that some glyph is not  at  the
right  place, nobody can stop me from changing its position.
For example, using eqn I typeset a formula

.EQ
P sub g = 10
.EN

and it doesn’t looks nice, because ‘P’ has a  lot  of  blank
space  before  the  subscripted  ‘g’.  Manually I adjust the
space before the subscript

.EQ
P back 20 sub g = 10
.EN

and it looks more pleasing to my eye.

Someone before noted that troff is for people  who  are  not
afraid  of to soil their hands. That is what I need exactly,
I want to soil my hands and do the job well to please my eye
and probably someone’s else.

The supplementary tools like pic and eqn are also exception‐
ally nice.  I used to typeset  a  small  booklet  on  linear
algebra basics and found that typesetting formulas (even the
complex ones) can be easy and literate  with  eqn.   When  I
typesetted  a  short  introductory  paper  on fuzzy logic, I
found that drawing control diagrams  and  blockschemes  with
pic  can  be  productive too.  Besides, every aspect of both
formulas and pictures can  be  handtuned,  if  I  want,  and
nobody  forces any policy on me.  Yes, my hands were soiled.
One day I had to typeset a  course  material  about  machine
arithmetics.   Standard  Symbols font had no glyphs I needed
(circled division and circled multiplication).  I wanted  my
paper  to  be  readable on any PostScript engine without any
additional fonts.  I draw all  of  them,  including  circled
addition   and   circled  subtraction,  using  groff  escape
sequences and declared them as glyphs.  Moreover, I  was  in
need  to draw many bit boxes displaying internal representa‐
tion of floating and fixed point numbers.  Hence I  wrote  a
couple of macroses to do this drawing job.  Someone (Eric S.
Raymond?) once noted that groff’s markup is a humane one and
he was right. It is humane.

I  can  give many other examples where semi‐complex typeset‐
ting tasks were made easy with the help of  groff.   Surely,
all  these  things can be done in LaTeX too, no doubts.  But
groff/troff ensures me that I can dig  in  the  macropackage
and understand it (with a high probability), customize it or
write my own macro, if it doesn’t exists.  Two  very  impor‐
tant  things  the groff/troff has, which seem to be problem‐
matic or difficult in LaTeX: it is able to produce plaintext
and  move the baseline position and current location coordi‐
nates at any place of the page absolutely.

With the hehemony of LaTeX and word‐processing  packages  we
often forget the pedagogical aspects of groff/troff.  But it
is another story...

--
Grisha

04.10.2012 23:09, Doug McIlroy пишет:
> I had to chuckle at this
> > I can't believe it fits in 10M.
> Back when troff was drilled into my fingers, it fit in 64K
> program space plus 64K data space. Each preprocessor got
> a similar allotment. Roff, the predecessor of troff, fit
> in 8K total. Some features have been added since, but in
> nothing like a ratio of 10,000:1 in utility.
>
> Doug McIlroy