[9fans] troff and ps related

[9fans] troff and ps related

[Rudolf Sykora]

Hello everyone,

can anybody tell me why whatever .ps about troff/eqn I print has
misplaced lines?
E.g. quite generally, lines that make up tables either don't touch, or
stick out somewhere...

Also, should
.BX something
make a nice box around 'something' or not? Anywhere I look I see the
top line be slightly above the side lines, it doesn't touch them.

Further, is there a way to view .ps files in a graceful way? Neither
proof nor page quite work for me. There is no comparison to gv in
linux at all, imho. It can't zoom well, if I manage to zoom in page
(often it takes infinitely long ---again compared to gv---, often it
ends with not enough memory; I also quite don't understand how the
zoom should work) it is not very nice, very unclear.

Thanks for comments
Ruda

Re: [9fans] troff and ps related

[erik quanstrom]

> can anybody tell me why whatever .ps about troff/eqn I print has
> misplaced lines?
> E.g. quite generally, lines that make up tables either don't touch, or
> stick out somewhere...

does it look bad with proof?  if so, this is generally
because of font problems.  i cribbed this from someone
and used it for the diskless fs and nupas papers.
you might not have a macros.ms; they're optional.

TARG=nupas.ps nupas.pdf

all:V: $TARG

%.ps:DQ:	%.ms
	eval `{doctype macros.ms $stem.ms} | \
	lp -m.9 -dstdout >$target

%.pdf:DQ: %.ps
	cat /sys/doc/docfonts $stem.ps >_$stem.ps
	ps2pdf _$stem.ps $stem.pdf && rm -f _$stem.ps

%.show:VQ:	%.ps
	page -w $stem.ps

- erik

Re: [9fans] troff and ps related

[Russ Cox]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 4:49 AM, Rudolf Sykora<rudolf.sykora@gmail.com> wrote:
> can anybody tell me why whatever .ps about troff/eqn I print has
> misplaced lines?
> E.g. quite generally, lines that make up tables either don't touch, or
> stick out somewhere...

this is because tbl is using characters to draw lines.
it's not a great strategy.

> Also, should
> .BX something
> make a nice box around 'something' or not? Anywhere I look I see the
> top line be slightly above the side lines, it doesn't touch them.

maybe should be doesn't.  there's a reason no one uses it.
even if it worked, boxes around words are pretty heavy weight.

> Further, is there a way to view .ps files in a graceful way? Neither
> proof nor page quite work for me. There is no comparison to gv in
> linux at all, imho. It can't zoom well, if I manage to zoom in page
> (often it takes infinitely long ---again compared to gv---, often it
> ends with not enough memory; I also quite don't understand how the
> zoom should work) it is not very nice, very unclear.

you can start page with a ppi parameter: page -p 150 file.ps
i have never managed to get gs to let me change that parameter
on the fly during the gs conversation.  if you can, please do,
and then make zoom on postscript files use that mechanism.

russ

Re: [9fans] troff and ps related

[Rudolf Sykora]

2009/7/8 Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>:
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 4:49 AM, Rudolf Sykora<rudolf.sykora@gmail.com> wrote:
>> can anybody tell me why whatever .ps about troff/eqn I print has
>> misplaced lines?
>> E.g. quite generally, lines that make up tables either don't touch, or
>> stick out somewhere...
>
> this is because tbl is using characters to draw lines.
> it's not a great strategy.

Does it mean that I can't do much about it? That it will probably be
always like this?

>
>> Also, should
>> .BX something
>> make a nice box around 'something' or not? Anywhere I look I see the
>> top line be slightly above the side lines, it doesn't touch them.
>
> maybe should be doesn't.  there's a reason no one uses it.
> even if it worked, boxes around words are pretty heavy weight.

Ok.
This then leads me to a question...
I've been using TeX to typeset my texts. I've never quite liked it,
all those backslashes. A few days ago I read the articles about eqn
and was surprised that it is quite nice. That I can read my formulas
when written (quite difficult in TeX) and that there are some natural
rules that simplify the notation (like that spaces are the delimiters,
etc; one doesn't have to bracket everything). I've understood that the
language is not so powerful as TeX, but it is at the same time much
simpler (source code). Further, somebody (see Heirloom tools) changed
troff so that it can use all types of current fonts, can do
microtypography, format whole paragraphs if wanted, can read
hyphenation rules formely designed for Tex. These changes (especially
fonts, hyphanation), if propagated to plan9 troff, could be of some,
not negligible, value.
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?

Thanks
Ruda

Re: [9fans] troff and ps related

[Russ Cox]

I assume you have a non-Plan 9 machine to play with.
It's worth trying Heirloom troff there to see if the boxes
are done better.  They probably are.  It would be a big
integration effort to fit the Heirloom troff changes into the
Plan 9 troff changes.  Maybe it is worth it; maybe not.

I like Heirloom troff for papers for its better handling of
postscript and opentype fonts, although when I need
to do nasty low-level things (like I do to generate slides)
I need to fall back to the Plan 9 troff, because the low-level
details seem to differ between the two.

Honestly the box drawing has never really bothered me.
I don't draw boxes around things because it's too noisy
for my tastes anyway.  Faulting troff for its box drawing is
like faulting a web browser for its text blinking.

> Do you think that troff is really dead?

Is my pocketknife dead?  Was it ever alive?
When troff does what I need it to do and is the quickest
way for me to get that done, it's the right tool for me.
It may not be the right tool for you.

Russ

P.S. For what it's worth, the Plan 9 troff reads tex
hyphenation rules too.

Re: [9fans] troff and ps related

[Rudolf Sykora]

2009/7/8 Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>:
> I assume you have a non-Plan 9 machine to play with.
> It's worth trying Heirloom troff there to see if the boxes
> are done better.  They probably are.

as far as I see, they are not better.

> I need to fall back to the Plan 9 troff, because the low-level
> details seem to differ between the two.

so, unlike TeX, different troffs produce different outputs, right?

> Honestly the box drawing has never really bothered me.
> I don't draw boxes around things because it's too noisy
> for my tastes anyway.

it's not only boxes; it's tables, as I mentioned, as well.

Thanks
Ruda

Re: [9fans] troff and ps related

[hiro]

Perhaps we should use troff and just convert it to tex?
Because I also hate to write/read tex.

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Rudolf Sykora<rudolf.sykora@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/7/8 Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>:
>> I assume you have a non-Plan 9 machine to play with.
>> It's worth trying Heirloom troff there to see if the boxes
>> are done better.  They probably are.
>
> as far as I see, they are not better.
>
>> I need to fall back to the Plan 9 troff, because the low-level
>> details seem to differ between the two.
>
> so, unlike TeX, different troffs produce different outputs, right?
>
>> Honestly the box drawing has never really bothered me.
>> I don't draw boxes around things because it's too noisy
>> for my tastes anyway.
>
> it's not only boxes; it's tables, as I mentioned, as well.
>
> Thanks
> Ruda
>
>

Re: [9fans] troff and ps related

[yy]

2009/7/9 hiro <23hiro@googlemail.com>:
> Perhaps we should use troff and just convert it to tex?
> Because I also hate to write/read tex.
>

I have an awk script to write latex in plain text, with a syntax
similar to markdown. It is an ad-hoc solution I am using to write my
thesis, but if you are interested drop me a line off-list.


--
- yiyus || JGL .

Re: [9fans] troff and ps related

[Dan Cross]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Rudolf Sykora<rudolf.sykora@gmail.com> 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.