Re: [Groff] Future direction of groff

[Clarke Echols]

My only use of macros was the man macros package when I produced the
HP-UX reference at HP, starting in 1985.  Otherwise, I write my own
macros to do what I need and they've served me well for over 20 years.

My first use of my own macros was when I used troff to create master
artwork for printed-circuit layout.  I designed a PC board for an
automotive service machine when I designed the control electronics and
didn't have a CAD system of any kind.

That's why I say (with tongue in cheek [non-Americans may not
understand that idiom]), you don't know troff until you've used it
to design printed circuits. :-)

I like groff and use it for all sorts of things.  I've never mastered
pic, and rarely use eqn.  Tbl is useful when I occasionally need it.
But that's not frequently.  I rewrote the tbl tutorial for HP because
the AT&T was too difficult for most users to make sense of because
there were so few examples with too little variety.  That was in the
late 1980s.

Clarke

On 02/09/2014 09:59 AM, Mike Bianchi wrote:
> My 2 cents.
>
> I learned nroff/troff in the mid 1970s, and have used it, almost exclusively,
> ever since.  It is what I know in my spine.  The MM macros are my presentation
> format of choice, for the same reason.
>
> But my criticism of groff, and HTML, TeX etc., is that presentation and
> formating are horribly intermingled.
>
> By "presentation" I mean concepts such as Title, Chapter, Section, Figure,
> Footnote, Table of Contents, Index (still use permuted index via ptx), etc.
> "Formating" to me means how it looks on paper/screen/tablet, etc.
>
> To me the value of groff is that the _words_ are the most important things
> and even if I lost my ability to format past *roff documents, I still have all
> the words.  I can even recover many of the words associated with presentation
> concepts.
>
> Done right, a really great macro package would have to clearly separated parts:
> presentation and format.  But it seems *roff has never really provided the
> architecture to support that sort of separation, hence macro packages that
> mush the concepts together.  And thus the long standing habit of tweaking the
> format with commands scattered among the words to fix the formatting errors.
>
> In an ideal world, I would write thinking only about the words of the text
> and their associated presentation concepts.  THEN, when sending my creation
> to the world, some automation would make it look appropriate on paper and all
> the variations of "screen" out there (on GoogleGlass?) without any further
> adjustment on my part.  (My best documents come close, but only because I am
> become blind to all the teaks inherent in the presentation macros.)
>
> I am not aware of any good examples of what I am looking for.  Are there?