On Sat, Dec 15, 2007, Robert Thorsby wrote: > On 15/12/07 04:25:40, Michael Kerpan wrote: > > ...that groff/troff seems to be written > > off by so many as "obsolete" ... > > IMO it is all a matter of perceptions. People think that a 30 year > old application that, even today, does not have a GUI **must** be > obsolete.
So true. I get the feeling, when explaining the clear advantages of *roff (or TeX, for that matter) to people raised in "gotta-be-GUI", that they think I'm trying to convince them the Victrola is superior to the iPod. > Add to this, *roff does not conform to The Debian Way (which > includes derivatives, such as *buntu). After so many years, I still don't quite grasp what The Debian Way is, and why that works against groff. Especially since I have never run any GNU/Linux distro other than Debian, and have used groff exclusively for all my document needs (groff built from source, of course). > There are no modern textbooks on *roff. The three I have are > about 20 years old. How many people are aware of the accompanying > documentation to Peter's mom macros? If someone could figure out a way to get funding for writing a modern text on *roff, I'd take on the project in a heartbeat. I've done what I can to make the documentation for mom an advertisement for groff, but it will never be enough. A thoroughly edited, hard copy textbook on *roff is what's needed. > Finally, we are our own worst enemies. Those who inhabit this > list, though incredibly polite and invariably helpful to newbies, > are always posting about arcane subjects. Big laugh over this, since both halves of the statement are so true. > Today, I use groff for everything, including business letters. This gets me thinking. *roff has always appeared horribly intimidating since so much of the available documentation suggests it's primarily for creating scientific/mathematical/technical documents, leading average janes-joes to conclude it's too unwieldy for simpler tasks. If one were wanting to do some serious *roff advocacy, one would need to emphasize *roff's usefulness for basic document needs (e.g. business letters) first, so that users attracted to *roff's way of doing things could then undertake the sort of exploration that begins with the question: "Gee--I wonder if *roff can do <fill in the blank for an advanced task>, too?" Years ago, I got a copy of the O'Reilly book, _Running Linux._ In the chapter on text processing, which dealt with *roff and TeX, the TeX section gave detailed instructions for writing a business letter using LaTeX; tellingly, the *roff section gave only instructions for writing a manpage. -- Peter Schaffter
