Re: [9fans] troff fonts with special characters

[Rudolf Sykora <rudolf.sykora@gmail.com>]

On 12 September 2010 20:25, Akshat <akumar@mail.nanosouffle.net> wrote:
> If you like the cleanliness and simplicity of troff files for writing
> papers, and would like to avoid the hideousness of TeX, then you might want
> to try Lout. I ported it to Plan 9 earlier this year and just copied it to
> my contrib: contrib/akumar/lout.tgz
>
>
> Best of luck,
> ak

Thanks for the idea.
Actually I was considering this a while ago. I even printed out the
manual.(I have lout in linux.)
However, from what I read there I gained the feeling that
-- it doesn't know utf (thus you can't really just write a single
letter 'alpha' as you can in troff)
-- it somehow seems to be an 'all together software' (as opposed to
tbl/pic/eqn/...), which I don't like.
-- the syntax for writing math is more complicated than in eqn. The
syntax is rather closer to TeX, which I wanted to avoid, though the
results, I feel, are no better than eqn's.
True, I haven't actually tried the software much. May be that I am
also wrong in some points.

Well, don't take me wrong. I have not much against (plain)TeX. When I
was about 15 and got a printed version of TeXBook, METAFONT, I was
amazed. Its documentation can't be better (nothing to compare to
anything). The algorithms are superior. It's not so big either
(although today's distributions are horrible, >1GB [this I really
hate]; but the core, as someone here is trying to put up, is fine; I
mean KerTeX or what). It's only that troff is even much simpler and
yet good enough. And also that the notation is much more human. Making
a table with tbl or a simple graph with grap is a pleasure. Equations
written for eqn can be read back from the source, without seeing
millions of \\\\\\\.This is, I would say, what totally grabbed me. And
the documentation as written by Kernighan is also awesome --- short,
answers many potential questions right away, explains things clearly.
This is why I also like plan 9, generally (though almost whatever I
try doesn't work). TeX is very 'strict', precise; but you must have a
good knowledge of it to talk it into something. Troff is more
straightforward, simpler, and is more fun, some things are playful,
e.g. traps.

Thanks
Ruda