avi@hpcehfe.UUCP (01/27/87)
Being one of those souls who has been using (di)troff for a number
of years and refuses to switch to TeX (so far), I thought I'd share
my reasons, some of which have already been stated.
Although inertia is undoubtedly a major factor, I would be willing
to waste a few weekends learning a new system (e.g., TeX) and
converting any text I keep around into a new format; however:
-- I move around quite a bit and, while I'm always (pretty)
sure troff will work on the next Unix system I use, I have
no idea if TeX will have been installed (or even if I could
convince the appropriate party to install it). Therefore,
if I depend on TeX, I can't count on being able to incorporate
text which I bring with me (reports, memos, references, etc.)
in a straightforward manner.
-- I've (unfortunately) amassed some expertise in the nitty-gritty
of troff formatting (especially ms macros), and I dread repeating
the experience. Since I'm not a `casual' document producer, I
know I'll eventually need to make TeX do something for me that
isn't straightforward.
-- Not only does troff have nroff, but troff (ditroff, that is)
can essentially use any font your driver/printer supports (when
provided with the appropriate width tables). TeX supports CM
fonts, period. Not only are they not widely available (and not
all printers allow for downloadable fonts), neither are they of
the same typographic quality as many fonts with which various
printers are equipped. See Knuth's comments on this subject.
Some of the complaints which have been voiced against troff have been
dealt with in various commercial (non-AT&T) troff products. While all
of these require seperate purchase and installation (e.g., third-party
Documenter's Workbench products), at least it has been demonstrated that
troff can be just as `useful' a product as TeX (although, granted, it
does not do as well on mathematical formulae).
I don't want to open a can of worms over whose troff is better than whose.
Interested readers can take a look at "Geritol for Old Programs, or,
Troff's Got a Lot of Life in it Yet!", in the USENIX Winter Conference,
January 1985, pp. 165-169. In there, you'll find discussions of some
modifications to ditroff which a few foolhardy souls in Toronto (myself
included) implemented, including:
-- a hyphenation exception dictionary
-- character kerning
-- logical-to-physical font mapping
-- font-table caching
-- long font and macro names
Avi Naiman
Hewlett Packard & University of Toronto
avi%hpcehfe@hplabs.hp.com
...!hplabs!hpcea!hpcehfe!avimichaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (01/27/87)
The discussion on troff vs. TeX brings up some roff questions I have. (We don't have TeX, or else they might be TeX questions :-) In article <1556@trwrb.UUCP> simpson@trwrb.UUCP (Scott Simpson) writes: >Troff disadvantages >-- Two character command names. >...with two letters it is easy to >come up with names for two different macros that clash. Does anyone have a list of register/string names that the me macros use internally? I could (and have) gone through the macros w/ sed looking for these, but I suspect I've missed a few... >-- Macros are often bizarre collection of symbols. The me macros file we have says a "commented version is available." We don't seem to have it. Where can I find one? >-- nroff > Troff has an equivalent program to output to an ASCII device. >TeX doesn't. This is nice. Unfortunately, besides the obvious things like >line breaks, troff and nroff output does not always come out the same. Last week I was working on a troff file that had lots of font size changes. I tried to preview it with nroff, but nroff ignored the font sizes when it decided line length, so the previewed version had little resemblance to the troff output. I'm not so interested in whether things are centered nicely on my nroff preview as I am in finding out where page breaks will be etc. Is there any way to get nroff to change line length/height depending on the font size? I suppose this would require major hacking of nroff... -- Mike Maxwell Boeing Advanced Technology Center arpa: michaelm@boeing.com uucp: uw-beaver!uw-june!bcsaic!michaelm