From: Pierre-Jean <sy...@ombres.eu>
> This could help me to resolve my personal "TeX vs
> Groff" advantages and disadvantages dilemma (And other peoâ
> ple reading the mailing list too).
This has been discussed a lot here. It also have been
discussed on plan9 mailing list. You could have a look at
these discussion if you still need to be convinced. Know
that there are at least four things to compare: Kertex (a
Tex distribution that only contain Plain Tex), Latex, Groff
and Heirloom Troff. Each one has advantages.
In my opinion, the advantage of troff (and groff) is that
it's easy to create and hack macro. The disadvantage is that
the macro you need probably doesn't exist yet. Less is more...
Another factor is size. A modern latex
distribution, i.e. texlive is enormous.
It is hard to manage. The fact that
it took years to create a texlive FreeBSD
port illustrates the complexity of just
maintaining a modern latex distribution.
Having used latex nearly exlusively for the
last 10 years, I'm amazed how tiny groff
is by comparison. Of course, there are good
reasons for this.
Anyway, learning groff after all these years
with latex makes me re-examine the very basics -
what is a document, what is a good structure,
and that not everything that is possible to
do is actually useful.
Probably if I need to typeset hundreds of complex
equations, I'll still use latex, but for mainly
text and image documents groff is a good
alternative.
Anton
