[9fans] troff macros for typesetting books/longer texts

[rudolf.sykora@gmail.com (Rudolf Sykora)]

> the Te?book may be authoratative, but it's by no means short.

This is the argument I'd stand by.
I read the TeXBook and used (plain)Tex much before ever touching
troff, thus I have a good idea about how it is written and explained.
Being a physicist, I use latex for writing articles. I have discovered
troff much later, basically because of plan9 (I had known of troff's
existence, sure, but never thought of trying it out). Basically,
seeing the conciseness and lucidity of works by Kernighan (eqn, tbl
documentation)---few extremely nice pages you can read over a
coffee---made me plunge into the troff's waters.

As I said many times, TeX is superior in (mainly math) quality.
However, troff and its preprocessors (eqn, tbl, grap,...) seem smaller
and more elegant to me. Eqn input is rather legible in the source
(even more with the ability to use utf-8 letters in place of e.g.
alpha; but this I think is now possible in some versions of TeX, too,
I believe).

Note, that neither plainTex nor troff handle cross-references,
automatic equation numbering, footnote numbering, table of contents,
etc. Nonetheless, mainly these listed features are often so needed.
One way out has been latex, which shows, in my opinion, how things
should not be done. There is also eplain, a much better choice for me
(plain extended with the mentioned almost always wanted features, and
some most frequent latex macros like graphix). What I am trying to get
is something like eplain, but for troff. And I wanted to have a look
at how some things are to be done. And to not invent a wheel, I asked
for some *simple* macros, which must have been used e.g. in the
mentioned books in my 1st contribution.

Just now I am reading "Unix Text Processing" by Dale Dougherty and Tim
O'Reilly, a freely available book (pmartin proposes it as well). There
are several chapters on the topic, so perhaps I'll get what I want in
the end.

Thanks
Ruda