[COFF] roff vs. Tex (was: Looking for final C compiler by Dennis Ritchie)

[lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

Back in 1998 or 1999 I was program chair for Linux expo.  Which was
no big deal, it meant I formatted the papers and got the page numbers
right for the proceeedings.  I nudged people towards troff and one
guy went there.  He said "this was so much easier than tex, it is
faster, easier, why don't more people use this?"   What he said.

On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 01:52:06PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> On Monday, 23 July 2018 at 12:41:46 -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 11:56 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I agree that roff is awesome, it's a bummer that Latex seems to be
> >> the winner (which I think is purely because the roff/eqn/pic/etc
> >> docs weren't widely available back in the day).
> >
> > I have to disagree with this, however. TeX (and more specifically
> > LaTeX) won out for technical writing because, frankly, it produces
> > nicer output than *roff did. If I were writing a thesis or paper,
> > I'd frankly rather use LaTeX or AMSLaTeX.
> 
> What about a book?  Back in the late 1980s/early 1990s I used TeX and
> LaTeX, but when I started writing "Porting UNIX Software" (O'Reilly),
> they insisted on me using (g)roff with their proprietary macros.  I
> resisted, of course, but it was clear that I didn't have much choice.
> And then I discovered that it was *so* much easier to use, and I've
> never used TeX again, though I made significant modifications to the
> macro set, to the point that it was no more O'Reilly than ms.
> 
> My big issue was that it produces nicer output than TeX.  In those
> days at any rate you could tell TeX output a mile off because of the
> excessive margins and the Computer Modern fonts.  Neither is required,
> of course, but it seems that it must have been so much more difficult
> to change than it was with [gt]roff (or that the authors just didn't
> care).
> 
> Still, TeX has one significant advantage over [gt]roff that I'm aware
> of: it adjusts paragraphs, not lines, and it seems that in some cases
> this give better looking layout.
> 
> This reflects the situation in about 1993 or 1994.  Maybe TeX has
> become more usable since then.  Certainly LaTeX refuses to look at my
> old LaTeX source.
> 
> Greg
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-- 
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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm