Dear Frank,
In general, perhaps a TeX group would be a better place to ask how to use TeX. However, having used both myself, I have to say, Troff/Groff is so simple and straight forward compared to La/TeX. LaTeX, on the other hand, offers the right level of abstraction for books and many other types of documents. I have long believed that the bes solution would be to create a LaTeX like macro package for Groff. First of all, it would make writing full-featured, modern documents easy. Second, it would make a Groff to LaTeX converter easy. This way you could do everything in Groff and then do a quick conversion for your publisher. This would be my favorite way of working. Blake McBride Frank Jahnke wrote:
I've been using troff for over 25 years (most recently as groff), and I still can get nearly any sort of text to jump through hoops. Unfortunately, the professional journals do not accept troff source. Invariably, they accept Word, WP and TeX, and while I am have OK skills with the former two, they really are not up to the sorts of heavy-duty tables, math and chemistry that I do in my publications. Besides, Word and WP produce truly ugly type. No, many journals won't accept PDF files as an original. To date I have been using a mechanical troff to latex translator, and while that works surprisingly well for most of the text, there are many things that need fixing. For example, any number registers set in troff are lost. So it is time for me to learn TeX better. Could anyone suggest an article or text that is "TeX for troff users?" I don't really want to work through the standard texts unless I have to. I know basically how TeX works, I would simply like to learn how to use the sorts of things I know from troff in a TeX environment. Any advice would be most appreciated. Frank
