Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book

["John A. Murdie" <john@cs.york.ac.uk>]

Rob Pike writes:
>I didn't switch to tex when it came out because it just seemed like
>the same thing packaged differently. ... It also has
>many disadvantages, including a screwy chatty user interface

I find this the most immediate unpleasantness of TeX.

>As time has passed, I have come to understand that it
>does equations better,

The LaTeX format (layout) has (macro) packages for a wider range of
equations, but I still find troff's eqn much easier to read and write.
In fact, I think the best part of the troff approach is the use of little
languages by preprocessor, and the worst thing about troff is its use of
interrupt-like traps. If you've written a troff macro package, I think
you'll know that more than expected care is necessary to get trap use right.

Some kind of (procedural markup?) programming language is necessary in
a typesetting system. I often wonder whether something like pic with
better text primitives, and galleying (pagination) functionality, would be
a better approach. Yes, I know, I should make time to experiment.

>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; why create a font language if only one person
>in the world can use it to make a font - it rankles.

Yes, though there are other TeX formats (layouts), such as CONTeXT,
LaTeX is almost universally used. Most effort seems to be put into
writing extra packages for use with the LaTeX format. There is some
use of MetaFont for specification of special symbols, but the TeX
world seems to be moving away from the use of bitmap fonts generated
from MetaFonts and towards the use of commercially-provided PostScript
or TrueType typefaces.

John A. Murdie
Department of Computer Science
University of York
England