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

[bakul at bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah)]

On Thu, 26 Jul 2018 14:22:20 +1000 Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
>
> That's the case now, I assume.  I've just dragged out the TeXbook
> (February 1989), LaTeX user's guide and reference (referring to LaTeX
> 2.06 (April 1986)) and "TeX for the Impatient" (1990).  None of them
> mention this command, and after 20 minutes of searching I wasn't able
> to find any reference in any of them to any font family except CM, and
> thus also no way to change to one.  About the only titbit I found was
> that you needed separate commands for each font at each size, and that
> this was impractical.  A far cry from troff's .ps command.

You may be used to an earlier version of LaTeX (LaTeX 2e?).
Things are considerably better now. I didn't use LaTeX much
for over a decade but now, with editors such as TeXWorks and
faster machines, rendering is quite fast. There are also some
webbased TeX editors that are quite good (and show rendered
page in one pane). Many more fonts are available now. And
there is plenty of help available at tex.stackoverflow.com.

For short simple documents I generally use MarkDown or
AsciiDoc.  Their light markup means source files are quire
readable in a terminal window, and they still render well to
an html page or pdf (and you can include images).  For more
complex editing tasks I switch to LaTeX (or XeLaTeX). And
Unicode has helped for Indic scripts. I don't have to use
transliterated Roman with diacritics for Indian languages
(hard to read/write in this form for a native speaker).