My only use of macros was the man macros package when I produced the HP-UX reference at HP, starting in 1985. Otherwise, I write my own macros to do what I need and they've served me well for over 20 years.
My first use of my own macros was when I used troff to create master artwork for printed-circuit layout. I designed a PC board for an automotive service machine when I designed the control electronics and didn't have a CAD system of any kind. That's why I say (with tongue in cheek [non-Americans may not understand that idiom]), you don't know troff until you've used it to design printed circuits. :-) I like groff and use it for all sorts of things. I've never mastered pic, and rarely use eqn. Tbl is useful when I occasionally need it. But that's not frequently. I rewrote the tbl tutorial for HP because the AT&T was too difficult for most users to make sense of because there were so few examples with too little variety. That was in the late 1980s. Clarke On 02/09/2014 09:59 AM, Mike Bianchi wrote:
My 2 cents. I learned nroff/troff in the mid 1970s, and have used it, almost exclusively, ever since. It is what I know in my spine. The MM macros are my presentation format of choice, for the same reason. But my criticism of groff, and HTML, TeX etc., is that presentation and formating are horribly intermingled. By "presentation" I mean concepts such as Title, Chapter, Section, Figure, Footnote, Table of Contents, Index (still use permuted index via ptx), etc. "Formating" to me means how it looks on paper/screen/tablet, etc. To me the value of groff is that the _words_ are the most important things and even if I lost my ability to format past *roff documents, I still have all the words. I can even recover many of the words associated with presentation concepts. Done right, a really great macro package would have to clearly separated parts: presentation and format. But it seems *roff has never really provided the architecture to support that sort of separation, hence macro packages that mush the concepts together. And thus the long standing habit of tweaking the format with commands scattered among the words to fix the formatting errors. In an ideal world, I would write thinking only about the words of the text and their associated presentation concepts. THEN, when sending my creation to the world, some automation would make it look appropriate on paper and all the variations of "screen" out there (on GoogleGlass?) without any further adjustment on my part. (My best documents come close, but only because I am become blind to all the teaks inherent in the presentation macros.) I am not aware of any good examples of what I am looking for. Are there?
