Re: Question about ?roff on Reddit

[John Gardner]

>
> John's a sneaky devil.  I've never seen the .cw request used in anger
> before


I'm sorry, I meant to write `.cs`, which was superfluous anyway (since I
already set line-length to 1n, which forced lines to be wrapped). I was in
a rush and hastily repurposing code from an earlier snippet
<https://github.com/Alhadis/Mono/blob/165718cdf14c26345ab76633a883fdff65627170/tmac/mono/strings.tmac#L10-L27>,
one that counted the number of characters in a string in a fully portable
fashion. In hindsight, I should've disabled hyphenation as well… apologies
for that.

As for the thread, I don't feel qualified enough about TeX to offer an
insightful opinion, as my experience with TeX is limited to one or two
documents—neither of which were fun to produce.

On Fri, 16 Jul 2021 at 23:36, Oliver Corff <oliver.corff@email.de> wrote:

> When I followed the first reddit link a few days ago for the first time,
> I read a few contributions and thought that it could be a challenge to
> reconcile the discrepancy between the internalized knowledge about
> things related to the "black art" (typesetting, that is) generally
> prevalent in this community here, not to speak of all the *roff details,
> on one hand, and the knowledge level present among the reddit readers on
> the other hand, as it came to my mind that any posting intended to be
> enlightening might unnecessarily appear highbrow and scare away
> potential readers who otherwise could develop an interest in things *roff.
>
> One question was similar to: "Are there any documents typeset in *roff
> which I can find in the net?", while a different posting already
> mentioned all the books typeset in *roff. But perhaps even Kernighan &
> Ritchie's "Programming in C" seems to be a thing of the remote past
> (given that it was published in 1988). I utterly fail to relate to that
> feeling, but is it really possible that one considers a book written
> before one was presumably born as outdated per se? (I assume the age
> median in the reddit group to be lower than here, but I may be wrong.)
>
> Yet, something like a gentle introduction about the fundamental
> differences, strengths and weaknesses of markup vs. typesetting vs. text
> processing would be a good idea. But, so many of these gentle
> introductions have already been written, and with so many platforms
> emerging (I assume the intersection set between gnu mailing list users,
> usenet group readers and reddit visitors is small, but was recently
> successfully demonstrated to be non-empty) it is pretty probable that
> every new "generic" and "gentle introduction" will miss its target
> audience if it is not published where its readers spend their time.
>
> On the other hand, the second, recent reddit link posted here
> demonstrates quite a level of insight among the contributors, compared
> to the other one.
>
> The only thing that can be done is to post a list of pointers to the
> groff site, to this mailing list (after all, it can be browsed in its
> entirety without registering anywhere --- also soon becoming a thing of
> the past, I am afraid), and perhaps to introductory articles in Wikipedia.
>
> The youtube postings were mentioned, too; that seems to be yet another
> clientele. Be it so --- good to have!
>
> Best regards,
>
> Oliver.
>
>
> On 16/07/2021 14:36, John Ankarström wrote:
> > Den 2021-07-16 kl. 03:50 skrev Nate Bargmann:
> >> I learned there is a Groff Reddit as well:
> >>
> >> https://www.reddit.com/r/groff/
> >>
> >> It seems to have quite a bit of activity which is fantastic.
> > I was just about to write this. I am relatively active on /r/groff (as
> > user quote-only-eee) and it would be great to see some more activity on
> > it, if there are other people here who have Reddit accounts. It is an
> > obvious place for beginners to ask questions.
> >
> > Perhaps I should contact moderator HexDSL about putting up information
> > about the groff mailing list on the subreddit, as many people who post
> > there presumably don't know about it.
> >
> >
>
>