On Wed, 26 Nov 2014 17:31:44 +0100 Tadziu Hoffmann <hoffm...@usm.uni-muenchen.de> wrote:
> The syntax of expressions and conditionals isn't what's keeping new > users from using groff. As Peter has already pointed out, the entire > working model of roff presents a much greater mental hurdle than the > one given by an idiosyncratic expression syntax. If I could add to that, this is one user for whom expression syntax represents no hurdle at all because as far as I know I've barely used it. One can write fairly complex documents, leaning on ms, tbl, pic, and eqn without ever writing a macro. The tide of new users is held to a trickle surely by the rebarbative syntax. IMO anyone willing to use find(1) or vi should cotton to groff if they give it half a chance. But I've never met anyone who'd consider it for anything except man pages. > I use groff because it's a programmable text formatter that > despite its peculiarities is based on a relatively simple > conceptual model that I can understand and that I can usually > coax into doing what I want. That would be me, too. :-) --jkl
