[TUHS] Introduction to {t,r,g}roff & co...

[TUHS] Introduction to {t,r,g}roff & co...

[Grant Taylor]

Hi,

Can anyone point to an introduction to {t,r,g}roff / pic / tbl / etcetera?

I've respected them for years and with all the latest discussions about 
them I'd like to try and learn something.

Any pointers would be appreciated.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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[TUHS] Introduction to {t,r,g}roff & co...

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> On Sep 4, 2017, at 3:06 PM, Grant Taylor <gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
> 
> Can anyone point to an introduction to {t,r,g}roff / pic / tbl / etcetera?

troff.org is one of the best places to start out.

[TUHS] Introduction to {t,r,g}roff & co...

[Larry McVoy]

Hi Grant, 

Somehow I missed your initial email, time to check my spam filters
I guess.

All this rambling below boils down to one thing: if you need help
with roff, I'm your guy.  Tell me what you want to do and I can
probably come up with some example stuff that you can play with.

I would suggest groff as a good start.  James did a great job.  There is
the heirloom stuff, I've played with it, my take is that it is like
Keith's nvi stuff, true to the origin but not useful because the world
has moved on.  Groff is my goto roff tool.

Anyhoo, I *love* troff and the preprocessors, I can draw pictures in my
head and then draw them in pic (I've done a lot of pic, got James to put
an extension in gnu pic so that you could iterate through the N things
you just drew, I can show you an exampe).

I _think_ I have the sources to the troff docs, I feel like I did a
project at one point to modernize how they looked.  

So you've gotten some good suggestions, I'm a fan of the original
docs though.  I still have the stack of docs that I bought at the 
UW Madison computing center - n/troff doc, pic, eqn, tbl.  Then 
there were various others, like grap, chem, etc.

I love all that stuff because it was designed at a time where you did
your markup and you sent it to the lab where the printer was and you
got it the next day or so.  There were no bitmapped displays, all this
stuff was done on 80x24 CRTs.  So the markup language, the pic stuff,
the eqn stuff, it all had to be something that you could see in your
head and put down in text.

That fits really well with how I think, I love the roff ecosystem to
this day (and I've done conference proceedings in roff and in LaTex,
I much prefer roff and the funny thing is when I show LaTex people
roff they go, wow, simple).

On Mon, Sep 04, 2017 at 03:18:35PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> 
> > On Sep 4, 2017, at 3:06 PM, Grant Taylor <gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
> > 
> > Can anyone point to an introduction to {t,r,g}roff / pic / tbl / etcetera?
> 
> troff.org is one of the best places to start out.

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] Introduction to {t,r,g}roff & co...

[Grant Taylor]

On 09/04/2017 08:19 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> Hi Grant, 

Hi Larry,

> Somehow I missed your initial email, time to check my spam filters
> I guess.

Ah, spam filters, the never ending battle.  I've been doing that for ...
much longer than I care to admit.  (Double digit years.)

> All this rambling below boils down to one thing: if you need help
> with roff, I'm your guy.  Tell me what you want to do and I can
> probably come up with some example stuff that you can play with.

Thank you Larry, your offer is very much appreciated.

I don't have a project that I'm working on per say.  Rather I've always
respected *roff and the recent threads on the TUHS list have stirred a
long standing interest.

> I would suggest groff as a good start.  James did a great job.  There is
> the heirloom stuff, I've played with it, my take is that it is like
> Keith's nvi stuff, true to the origin but not useful because the world
> has moved on.  Groff is my goto roff tool.

I'm okay learning some history while learning new things.  What I don't
learn initially, I like to circle back and learn more.  -  Sort of like
why I subscribe and participate in TUHS.

> Anyhoo, I *love* troff and the preprocessors, I can draw pictures in my
> head and then draw them in pic (I've done a lot of pic, got James to put
> an extension in gnu pic so that you could iterate through the N things
> you just drew, I can show you an exampe).

I'd be interested in seeing an example, if it's handy.

I was going through "troff and its companion programs" (troff and its
companion programs) briefly at work and found it to be fairly easy to
follow to see some initial results.

> I _think_ I have the sources to the troff docs, I feel like I did a
> project at one point to modernize how they looked.  

I have a dead tree copy of "UNIX Text Processing" somewhere and have
thumbed through it multiple times.

I was pleasantly surprised to see m4 in there, something I occasionally
choose to use for new projects.

> So you've gotten some good suggestions, I'm a fan of the original
> docs though.  I still have the stack of docs that I bought at the 
> UW Madison computing center - n/troff doc, pic, eqn, tbl.  Then 
> there were various others, like grap, chem, etc.

I've already started lifting an eyebrow at things like the fact that
chem is an awk script.  -  I've done more in awk than some, but am
impressed, and want to learn more.  -  What it does, how it does it, and
how I might be able to apply that methodology to other things.

> I love all that stuff because it was designed at a time where you did
> your markup and you sent it to the lab where the printer was and you
> got it the next day or so.  There were no bitmapped displays, all this
> stuff was done on 80x24 CRTs.  So the markup language, the pic stuff,
> the eqn stuff, it all had to be something that you could see in your
> head and put down in text.

I'm cool with that.

One of the current questions is how, and why, people chose different
macro packages.

I do see why someone would use (or write / modify) macros to do some
basic things in *roff.  -  I suspect it's similar to what I've hard of
people do in assembly programming.  Namely write in the macro language
that is then expanded to the lower layer *roff.

My knee jerk reaction for expanding short text (macros) into longer text
with logic would be m4.  But I want to learn the *roff world before I
get off course.

> That fits really well with how I think, I love the roff ecosystem to
> this day (and I've done conference proceedings in roff and in LaTex,
> I much prefer roff and the funny thing is when I show LaTex people
> roff they go, wow, simple).

:-)



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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[TUHS] Introduction to {t,r,g}roff & co...

[Clem Cole]

The Unix Programming Environment
<https://www.amazon.com/Unix-Programming-Environment-Prentice-Hall-Software/dp/013937681X>
has
a nice chapter on the *roff family as well as other classic UNIX skills.
In fact Rob continues to maintain a web page describing the book which is a
classic:

   - Rob's UPE Page
   <http://books.cat-v.org/computer-science/unix-programming-environment/>

Obviously you still buy a copy from amazon by following that URL or the
like or you can just download and print it from: UPE Download from
cs.uwec.edu
<http://cs.uwec.edu/~buipj/teaching/cs.388.s14/static/pdf/upe.pdf>


On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 6:06 PM, Grant Taylor <gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Can anyone point to an introduction to {t,r,g}roff / pic / tbl / etcetera?
>
> I've respected them for years and with all the latest discussions about
> them I'd like to try and learn something.
>
> Any pointers would be appreciated.
>
>
>
> --
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die
>
>
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[TUHS] Introduction to {t,r,g}roff & co...

[Grant Taylor]

On 09/04/2017 04:06 PM, Grant Taylor wrote:
> Any pointers would be appreciated.

Thank you all for the pointers.

I'm sure that I can get myself sufficiently deep in the *roff rabbit 
hole with this.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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[TUHS] Introduction to {t,r,g}roff & co...

[Norman Wilson]

Call me old-fashioned, but I still think the papers in Volume 2
of the Seventh Edition manual are a good straightforward start.
There's a tutorial on troff, and papers introducing eqn, tbl,
and refer.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

[TUHS] Introduction to {t,r,g}roff & co...

[Grant Taylor]

On 09/04/2017 05:22 PM, Norman Wilson wrote:
> Call me old-fashioned, but I still think the papers in Volume 2
> of the Seventh Edition manual are a good straightforward start.
> There's a tutorial on troff, and papers introducing eqn, tbl,
> and refer.

Why am I not surprised that "A TROFF Tutorial" is written by Brian 
Kernighan.

Link - A TROFF Tutorial
  - https://wolfram.schneider.org/bsd/7thEdManVol2/trofftut/trofftut.html



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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[TUHS] Introduction to {t,r,g}roff & co...

[arnold]

Norman Wilson <norman at oclsc.org> wrote:

> Call me old-fashioned, but I still think the papers in Volume 2
> of the Seventh Edition manual are a good straightforward start.
> There's a tutorial on troff, and papers introducing eqn, tbl,
> and refer.
>
> Norman Wilson
> Toronto ON

I would also recommend finding a copy of "Software Tools" or "Software
Tools in Pascal" (or both!) and reading the chapters where they
write a "little brother" to nroff, explaining many of the basic ideas
along the way.

Arnold