From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: References: Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2009 12:08:36 -0400 Message-ID: From: Dan Cross To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [9fans] troff and ps related Topicbox-Message-UUID: 1620904c-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Rudolf Sykora wrote: > But now (from the answers to my questions about boxes, tables) I am > becoming less enthusiastic. Can anybody comment on this? Do you think > that troff is really dead? Like most things in life, the answer is an emphatic, "it depends." Weighing in as a mathematician (which I am by training, if not profession) I have to say that if you are typesetting mathematics, TeX (or more appropriately LaTeX) is the way to go for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is a sizable community that accepts it as the standard. Eqn, while simpler, just doesn't cut it. If, on the other hand, one has to typeset prose or something like a manual page or technical report (minus a lot of math) then I prefer troff because it's simpler. But I'm sure that's partly a function of the way I "grew up" with respect to typesetting. These days all the kids are excited about DocBook and XML. I'm sure there will be howls of protest, but honestly I think it's a reasonable format for many things, with the added benefit that I can transform it into a number of other formats: such is the nature of XML. It may suck in many ways, it may violate the purity of the traditional Unix model, it may be abused into applications where it is not well suited, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have utility. So is troff dead? No, but as Russ points out with his pocket knife analogy, it is inanimate and thus was never alive. Asking whether it's dead is the wrong question because, in the end, it's just another tool: use it if it's appropriate, or don't. It all depends on what you're trying to accomplish and whether you can do that in the simplest, most direct manner. - Dan C.