Hi Bertrand,
thank you for your answer. All two ideas are very good, and will make
the first paragraph more powerful.
I am afraid, I would not found the right words for it, because I'm not a
-mom user (not yet).
If you want, write it yourself (I suppose, you are french-speaking).
Just click on "modifier" on the right, and you can write it down.
Thanks a lot.
Grégoire
Le mercredi 22 octobre 2014 à 02:11 +0200, Bertrand Garrigues a écrit :
> Hi Gregoire,
>
> Just read your introduction, good work!
>
> On Tue, Oct 21 2014 at 11:01:40 PM, Peter Schaffter <pe...@schaffter.ca>
> wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 21, 2014, GregExp wrote:
> >> I could take the chapter 3.1 (terminal)and 3.2 (éditeur de texte en
> >> console) after the chapter 3.3 (wich describe the "normal" using of
> >> groff) of even at the very end, after chapter 7, as "special using of
> >> groff".
> >
> > That's probably the best way to deal with it. From my own
> > experience of leading people through groff for the first time, I
> > always begin with: "Step one, fire up a text editor." The basic
> > learning flow is:
> >
> > - fire up a text editor (doesn't matter if it's a console or GUI interface)
> > - demonstrate basic groff usage with some simple text
> > - introduce command line and options
> > - process the demonstration
>
> I agree with Peter that parts 3.1 and 3.2 take a bit too much space in
> your introduction. Here are a few more suggestions.
>
> First, at the beginning (before chapter 1): I think you could briefly
> explain the concept of macro packages here (without changing anything to
> "5. Choisir sa boîte à outils"). As you said "Groff s'utilise donc de
> manière analogue à latex", you could develop a bit further and make a
> parallel between groff/mom and tex/latex, and maybe emphasizes that mom
> is the simpliest package. Why insist on the macros packages and on mom?
> I have two reasons (from my own experience):
>
> - People will compare groff to tex/latex, arguing that groff ("ah, that
> legacy software for man pages") has an obscure syntax and that latex
> is much easier. Therefore, it could be a good idea to write a few
> words on the fact that convenient macro packages exist.
>
> - When I first used groff a few years ago, I picked 'ms' because it
> seems the easiest package to learn and because I didn't know the
> existence mom. Neither the groff.pdf generated from the texinfo file
> nor the site (at that time) did mention mom. Later I switched to mom
> and of course it was easier. I don't see any point for a complete
> beginner to start with something else than mom.
>
> Secondly, I feel that your introduction lacks a concrete, real example
> that shows groff's ability to produce beautiful documents. Maybe you
> could use one of the example files shipped in the groff package? If I
> refer to the list of files of the Ubuntu 14.04 groff package, several
> example files are installed. You could suggest the reader to
> regenerate, for example, sample_docs.pdf with:
>
> groff -m mom -Tpdf sample_docs.mom > sample_docs.pdf
>
> or even
>
> pdfmom sample_docs.mom > sample_docs.pdf
>
> if you want to briefly introduce the pdfmom script (sample_docs.mom will
> not need it though, if I am not mistaken there are no pdf links in it).
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Bertrand Garrigues
