[COFF] [TUHS] Looking for final C compiler by Dennis Ritchie

[crossd at gmail.com (Dan Cross)]

[+COFF and TUHS to Bcc:]

Okay, here we go: troff vs. TeX food fight.

On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 11:56 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> I actually wacked a bunch of the Unix docs to make them look a little
> better, I should see if I can find that.
>

I'd like to see that; presentation of some of those docs is getting a bit
long in the tooth.

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.

I've used eqn to try and typeset math; it's OK if it's all that you've got.
An nroff approximation for output to the terminal is kind of nifty, but
beyond that it simply pales in comparison to TeX. I know that people have,
and perhaps still do, typeset mathematics with eqn/neqn/troff, but given a
choice between the two, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a
mathematician who would choose troff over TeX; similarly with most
technical papers.

Now tbl and pic, those are pretty cool. Even then, GNU pic will output TeX
for incorporation into other documents, and LaTeX has some very nice
table-creation environments that largely subsume the functionality of tbl.

Now don't get me wrong, I *like* roff, and I use it occasionally for
one-off things, but for serious writing for publication I'd generally chose
LaTeX.

        - Dan C.
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