From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-Id: <200101100016.AAA13091@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 07 Jan 2001 10:17:53 EST."
             <20010107151801.CD357199F7@mail.cse.psu.edu> 
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From: Steve Kilbane <steve@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 00:16:41 +0000
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Rob:
> I didn't switch to tex when it came out because it just seemed like
> the same thing packaged differently.  It didn't seem like an
> improvement.

I starting using troff and latex for exactly the same reason: that's
what was used to typeset documents in the place I was at, at the time.
First used troff, moved to a texhouse. Later moved back to a troff
place. In both cases, I rewrote local house styles in what I'd just
been using, and what I was most familiar with.

It's been a long time, so I don't remember any details, but I vaguely
recall that my primary experience was this: each made some things
much easier than the other, and other things much harder.

> It also has
> many disadvantages, including a screwy chatty user interface

I loathed the interface, too. I think troff's pipeline approach
is a much cleaner, clearer interface than tex's abort-and-ask
style. Similarly, preloaded packages seem bizarre. However, the
actual languages didn't seem to have much between them.

> and a
> serious misjudgement about how fonts should work, which saddles it
> with very few fonts - until recently, only one - which is, in turn,
> certainly the ugliest book font that ever got widespread use.

This surprises me, I have to admit. I've never sat down and tried
to add new fonts to either system. My experiences with troff were
that there were hardly any fonts; tex seemed to come with loads,
but I couldn't figure out how to load them. These might be an
artifact of the local installations, more than anything else.


> Because this at one level so unimportant, but at another is the entire
> point of the exercise - why create a layout language that produces
> only one layout;

I'll go along with this, for latex at least. I didn't enjoy creating
page styles from the ground up in troff, and reading latex styles is
a nightmare, so by and large, I've used the default ones. However, I've
had reason to do a fair amount of latex in standard fiction submission
format: fixed width font, double-spaced, no right justification, no
hyphenation, and emphasis via underlining. These are all exactly the
opposite of what tex considers to be "right", and it fights every step
of the way.

Bottom line, though: I've never yet found a typesetting system that
allows me to do everything I want, without blood and tears. It just
seems to be a matter of picking which things annoy you less.

steve