[9fans] off topic: troff book

[9fans] off topic: troff book

[James A. Robinson]

Has anyone here read Unix Document Processing and Typesetting by
B. Srinivasan? If so, would you recommend it?  The only other book I've
seen which talks about troff is The UNIX Programming Environment, and I'm
interested in seeing what others have to say about the troff/tbl/eqn/pic
typesetting environment.


Jim

Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book

[John E. Gwyn]

"James A. Robinson" wrote:
> ...  The only other book I've seen which talks about troff is The
>  UNIX Programming Environment, and I'm interested in seeing what
> others have to say about the troff/tbl/eqn/pic typesetting
> environment.

There have been several books on the Documenter's WorkBench (DWB),
which is the name AT&T used for the separately licensed package of
troff and associated tools.  You can license the latest version
(3.1 I think) although it's a bit pricey for personal use.  There
were papers in the Bell Labs CSTR series describing most of these
tools, and the papers are available on-line.  The current Research
version of most of those tools is bundled into Plan 9 Release 3,
also available under a free license on-line, and the Plan 9
documentation includes user guides for some of them (and UNIX-style
manual pages for all).  The GNU project has some independently
developed troff-workalike tools ("groff" etc.) which are freely
available.

http://www.unipress.com/toolkit/dwb.html	Lucent/Unipress DWB
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/		Bell Labs Plan 9
http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/groff.html	GNU troff (groff)

I use DWB (2.0 plus local improvements) for my own technical
documentation.  You need to be aware that it is meant to be used
primarily as a set of specialized programming languages, not via a
graphical user interface (although interactive drawing tools do
exist).  In many ways it is similar to Knuth's TeX.  Its main
advantage over nearly all GUI-based formatters (Word, etc.) is its
relative lack of presumptions about the way you want your document
formatted.  For example, it does not insist on modeling all text
as characters packed into lines; you can place any character
anywhere on the page, including overstriking other characters.
The programmability is largely tamed via macro packages (much
like with TeX), most often the "MS" or "MM" packages, provided
with DWB.  One of the things I like most about DWB is the ability
to easily create specialized preprocessors to build graphs, etc.
which can be done within Makefiles, for example.

Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book

[Allan J. Heim]

> Has anyone here read Unix Document Processing and Typesetting by
> B. Srinivasan? If so, would you recommend it?

I'm sure it's fine. "Word Processing on the Unix System" (I don't have
the author's name handy) was also really good, but it's years out of
print. A look at Amazon reveals "Document Formatting and Typesetting on
the Unix System" by Narain Gehani, and I seem to recall that it was
useful.

Having been a troff typesetter in my youth, I'd ask you to consider
TeX/LaTeX as an alternative. It seems more complex to set up, but it's
very sophisticated typesetting software, and the community
(http://www.tug.org/) is very active. There's even a graphical front-end
for LaTex, called "LyX".

-- 
Allan J. Heim   mailto:ajh@netscape.com

Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book

[Boyd Roberts]

From: Allan J. Heim <ajh@netscape.com>
> 
> Having been a troff typesetter in my youth, I'd ask you to consider
> TeX/LaTeX as an alternative. It seems more complex to set up, but it's
> very sophisticated typesetting software, and the community
> (http://www.tug.org/) is very active. There's even a graphical front-end
> for LaTex, called "LyX".

knuth had lost his mind [tex].  lamport was a screwhead [latex].

gimme raw troff anyday...

Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book

[Steve Kilbane]

Boyd boyded thus:
> knuth had lost his mind [tex].  lamport was a screwhead [latex].
> 
> gimme raw troff anyday...

Hold on. TeX and LaTeX have their good and bad points, but exactly
how did they screw up in ways that troff didn't? Off the top of my
head, the only thing that comes to mind is that troff would read
from stdin, while tex would insist on a named file, getting in the
way of pipelining. But that's more a style of use, rather than of
the systems themselves.

steve

Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book

[Boyd Roberts]

From: Steve Kilbane <steve@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>
> 
> Hold on. TeX and LaTeX have their good and bad points, but exactly
> how did they screw up in ways that troff didn't? Off the top of my
> head, the only thing that comes to mind is that troff would read
> from stdin, while tex would insist on a named file, getting in the
> way of pipelining. But that's more a style of use, rather than of
> the systems themselves.

they could read /dev/drum for all i care.

they are _ghastly_.

my 'lamport was a screwhead' comes from my two years at PRL.

lame defense, but i'm entitled to my opinon.

if tex was so great, where was the need for latex?

[9fans] Re: off topic: troff book

[Jim Choate]

On Sun, 7 Jan 2001, Boyd Roberts wrote:

> From: Steve Kilbane <steve@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>
> > 
> > Hold on. TeX and LaTeX have their good and bad points, but exactly
> > how did they screw up in ways that troff didn't? Off the top of my
> > head, the only thing that comes to mind is that troff would read
> > from stdin, while tex would insist on a named file, getting in the
> > way of pipelining. But that's more a style of use, rather than of
> > the systems themselves.
> 
> they could read /dev/drum for all i care.
> 
> they are _ghastly_.
> 
> my 'lamport was a screwhead' comes from my two years at PRL.
> 
> lame defense, but i'm entitled to my opinon.
> 
> if tex was so great, where was the need for latex?

http://www.latex-project.org/intro.html

The relation is 'language definition' and 'compiler implimentation'.

I use Scientific Notebook which combines LaTeX and Maple V. Very cool for
a technical doodle pad. Strongly suggested for all students. less than
$100. I don't work for the company or receive any sort of payment, just my
opinion.

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Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book

[Steve Kilbane]

Boyd's case for [La]TeX being worse than troff:
> they are _ghastly_.

..which is somewhat less reasoned than I'd hoped for. Got anything
other than personal dislike?

> my 'lamport was a screwhead' comes from my two years at PRL.

It also comes across as an attack on Lamport, rather than on
LaTeX, so it still needs backing up.

> lame defense, but i'm entitled to my opinon.

Absolutely. You're welcome to prefer troff to *tex, but I'd
be really interested if you could justify that preference based
on the packages' corresponding merits. C'mon, you can do it. :-)

> if tex was so great, where was the need for latex?

Same reason you had troff -man. It's a macro language;
you provide macro packages to make life easier.

steve