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

[quanstro@quanstro.net (erik quanstrom)]

>> the Te?book may be authoratative, but it's by no means short.
> 
> You can get started with the very first chapters. And once you stumble
> upon something more special, you pick up the book.
> 
> 300 pages without the appendices, and with exercices it's short; and
> exhaustive. Compare with books about "LaTeX".

i'm going to call this the "latin is easy" theory.
cantonese and arabic are much harder to learn.

?

> But most of the "difficulties" with TeX come precisely because this is
> not "plain" TeX: plain TeX (i.e. the macros from D.E. Knuth) just work
> too. But TeX is hidden---see the comments I received at first: "why do
> you want to make a TeX package? People only use LaTeX..."

most of the difficulties of te? are because
it's a macro language.  macros don't scale.

dek did a wonderful job, but you just can't
paper over the fact that all this wierd macro
expansion is going on.

- erik