Re: [Groff] *roff for desktop publishing - is it feasible?

[Damian McGuckin]

On Tue, 25 Oct 2016, Steve Izma wrote:

> I think the whole point of typography is to make texts more readable 
> than impressionist paintings. I like to read what I typeset, not just 
> look at it.

Yes. For books, reports, manuals, etc, the key feature is readability. For 
an advertisement, it is more visual impact. A brochure or the like falls 
in between. But if a brochure does not convey enough content/detail, it 
fails in its purpose.

> It's also my opinion that so-called desktop publishing has developed 
> primarily for visual artists (i.e., graduates of art schools) and its 
> paradigm has much more to do with the arrangement of objects on a canvas 
> than on a page.

It has become that (or degenerated to that) over the last 30 years.

> Therefore its main tool is the mouse rather than the keyboard, and its 
> main mode is cut-and-paste rather than document structure and flow.

Too often that approach results in the content getting lost in the middle 
of the arrangement or the content becoming a 2nd class component in the
document.

> For these reasons the paradigm of troff and TeX (I think you could call 
> it "control flow" or programmability, or something like that) just seems 
> uninteresting and obscure to those dominating the graphic arts industry 
> today.

That's a better word. content in a lot of so-called desktop publishing is 
OBSCURED by the arrangement.

Some trade journals which are funded by their advertising, often suffer, 
or loose relevance because all the effort goes into creating the flashy 
advertisements done by these graphic artists. far less work goes into the 
content/arrangment/quality/readability/grammar of the articles and they
loose their readership.

Regards - Damian

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