From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: bakul@bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Mon, 07 May 2018 21:11:50 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] [groff] Brian Kernighan on the evoution of eqn, pic, grap into troff In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 07 May 2018 17:39:58 -0700." <201805080039.w480dwfd005761@darkstar.fourwinds.com> References: <201805060229.w462T9Ee018534@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <201805080039.w480dwfd005761@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Message-ID: <20180508041157.C9ED9156E510@mail.bitblocks.com> On Mon, 07 May 2018 17:39:58 -0700 Jon Steinhart wrote: > > IMHO, the tex language is too ugly. I much prefer troff. But, and maybe this > will be a retirement project, giving troff tex's two-dimensional layout smarts > so that widows and orphans don't have to be handled manually would be nice. > > Remember, we're lucky that Don didn't work on X Windows because he would > have called it Ech. You can pronounce TeX as if it is written in Cyrillic: Tiyekh! And then of course, LyaTiyekh! Though I vastly prefer TeX/LaTeX/XeLaTeX over troff (unlike most folks on this list) and find even the source code more legible than ugly control lines starting with a "." -- In *TeX I can reformat most parahraphs to balance lines, without things falling aport. Now one can avoid most of the hassles for simple documentation by using markdown or asciidoc & tools that generate .tex, which can be rendered beautifully. Even here you can typically use LaTeX formatting for equations.