On 07/29/2011 06:10 PM, Anton Shepelev wrote:
Mike Bianchi:
[...] To do even the simplest document requires
much-too-much expertise for the rank beginner.
What is missing is a Front Door that leads you
gently into the Castle, teaches you the way
through the rooms, closets and pantries, so you
can live comfortably there with what is present.
Then (and only then) should you be led down into
the basement and shown how the electric, water,
heat and sewage utilities work. Finally you
should go into the workshop and start building
your own mechanisms.
This approach to learning Groff would only work if
there were a simple, high-level and self-contained
set of macros that would hide the underlying mecha-
nisms perfectly well, sparing the user the need to
intefere with the low-level stuff. This would be a
full new layer on top of Groff, like LaTeX is built
on top of TeX and may be used without ever resorting
to TeX. Besides, this is like applying theorems
without understanding their proofs.
From my own experince, the existing packages are
much stronger coupled with Groff and cannot be used
without good understanding of Groff itself. I didn't
try mom though.
What I was missing the most in the beginning was a
Groff tutorial that would deliver information in
learning order, as opposed to reference order, as
the info manual does.
Anton
I was working on a troff/nroff tutorial at HP back in
1988, but got pulled off of it to handle the HP-UX
Reference (man pages) for four years. The version that
got produced was a cut-down version for nroff only,
and it never hit the bookstore market like the vi
manual I wrote in 1987 that went to trade press in 1990.
My advice for learning troff/groff is to take an uncommented
macro package, add comprehensive comments about how every
line works, and what it does.
Do that, and you'll have a lot of understanding that's
hard to get otherwise.
A good *roff tutorial that starts with basic page layout,
margins, indents, etc., then moves on to headlines, and
other "ordinary" stuff would be an excellent resource.
Then move on to more advanced techniques, writing macros,
etc.
Lots of work.
But in a world of idiots using Microsoft Word while
thinking it's great software, it could be an uphill
battle.
When my clients insist that my work be in Word, I add
25% to my fee. I prefer giving them a PostScript file
or a PDF.
Clarke
