Re: Question about ?roff on Reddit

[Wim Stockman]

Ah now we know what that .cw means :-).
I'm glad it wasn't some dark undocumented force.
Happy weekend everybody.
Wim Stockman


Op zo 18 jul. 2021 om 15:19 schreef John Gardner <gardnerjohng@gmail.com>:

> >
> > 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 before one was presumably born as outdated per se?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.
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
>