Re: [Groff] The future redux

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Federico,

Ralph Corderoy wrote on Sat, Mar 01, 2014 at 11:29:08AM +0000:
> Federico wrote:

>> While we are (slightly) digressing, may I ask the broader group, what
>> are the best current tutorials for Groff?
>> 
>> Most of the material I know of is... rather dated. Not necessarily
>> bad, but not very recent either - and not very concise, either.  What
>> do you point to get new users started? What???s the current favorite
>> resource?

> I still like Ossanna/Kernighan's CSTR #54, _Nroff/Troff User's Manual_,
> http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cstr/54.ps.gz or http://troff.org/54.pdf.
> It's clear and concise but covers a lot of ground;  typical of
> Kernighan's writing IMO.

There is also an updated version by Gunnar Ritter, 15 years younger,
i.e. from 2007: http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools/troff.pdf

Probably i wouldn't call these two "tutorials", though, rather
"reference manuals".  But they are no doubt of an excellent quality.

If you compare these two with the current GNU troff manuals,
you will be able to understand, in quite some detail, which
features are available in different roff implementations,
and which are less portable.

The Plan 9 troff(1) manual cites:

       B. W. Kernighan, ``A TROFF Tutorial'', Unix Research System
       Programmer's Manual, Tenth Edition, Volume 2.

That should be available from:

  www.cs.bell-labs.com/10thEdMan/

Unfortunately, that site is offline again, so i cannot check right
now, but last time i was there, i think all the chapters were
available.

However, i admit none of this is recent.
I don't know any recent roff tutorials.

> Then there's Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly's _Unix Text Processing_.
> http://home.windstream.net/kollar/utp/  Given they were using troff to
> produce their books, and continued to use groff for a long time to do
> the production even when they moved to XML mark-up, they knew the
> subject.