Re: Learning troff - where to start?

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi,

Damian McGuckin wrote on Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 11:41:59AM +1100:
> On Wed, 14 Oct 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

>> But that brings us back to where we came in: where is there
>> well-structured documentation for the current groff?

> Agreed.  It is not there.

I wonder where this myth is coming from.

It is here, generated from the texinfo sources:

  https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/

For groff itself, this is excellent documentation with respect to
completeness, precision, structure, and indexing.

Some specific macro packages are documented in additional documents,
for example manual pages and HTML files, which are also of good
quality.

Yes, there are details that can be polished, and Branden is working
on that.  If you feel bored, you can also start quibbles regarding
the choice of markup language.  But the big picture is that groff
documentation is in better shape than the documentation of many
other software packages.

Given the size and complexity of groff, new users might wish to
read a simpler document first, for example CSTR#54, or another
classical text, several of which were mentioned, just like a newbie
to the C programming language might still use Kernighan/Richie to
get an initial understanding what the basic ideas of the language
are.

But none of that means groff isn't properly documented, and it
doesn't feel helpful to me conveying such an impression when new
users ask questions.

Yours,
  Ingo