Re: Learning troff - where to start?

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote in
 <20201013232627.GB24942@eureka.lemis.com>:
 |On Tuesday, 13 October 2020 at 22:49:03 +0200, J.-J. wrote:
 |> Le mardi 13 octobre 2020 à 14:41 +0200, Johann Höchtl a écrit :
 |>> * What would be a good starting point (tutorial) into troff and its
 |>> core principles?
 |>>
 |>> * What is the canonical documentation of troff all the existing
 |>> implementations seem to derive from and describe their deltas in
 |>> their respective documentation?
 |>
 |> Here is in my opinion the best book on the subject
 |> (and it's now  FREE!) :
 |>
 |> https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/utp/
 |
 |An excellent book, and one that I have used a lot.  But nobody can
 |claim that it's up-to-date (it predates groff), and there are many
 |features in groff that weren't in the troff version described.  Isn't
 |it sad that nothing more modern is available?

Ha!  Twenty years ago when my wonderful TeX package got lost and
i had to rapidly implement something and decided due to
frustration to do something entirely different i went to the local
book store (and i still do not do such things over the net), and
they could not offer just about anything.  Solschenizyn, also.
Later.  All that before the advent of on-demand printing, however.

I would point to the groff info manual, and the groff manual
pages.  It is a bit tough to get you going, but if you understand
there are traps and page dimensions then this surely is a starter.
Other than that you need to know what you want, anyway.

Fonts are hard, device files are hard, the process separation is
hard (and a show stopper), but then there is lout and the lua-
implemented thing which appears to be really great and cool,
unfortunately i have forgotten the name of it.  Ralph surely knows
that.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)