Re: [TUHS] eqn

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

My complaint with LaTex et al is that it is escape based.  Roff wants
stuff to start at the beginning of the line.  Which mean Roff input will
version control *dramatically* better which leads to better collaboration.

My kid already knows Latex, I'd like him to try roff.

On Fri, Oct 04, 2019 at 04:52:29PM +0100, U'll Be King of the Stars wrote:
> On 04/10/2019 15:57, aksr wrote:
> >Have you tried (heard of) neatroff[1] and neateqn?
> >Neateqn uses TeX's algorithm for typesetting mathematical formulas.[2]
> >Here is an example: http://litcave.rudi.ir/neateqndemo.pdf
> >
> >[1] http://litcave.rudi.ir/neatroff.pdf
> >[2] http://litcave.rudi.ir/neateqn.pdf
> 
> I have tried these and I have been in touch with the author.  He was very
> helpful.
> 
> One thing that surprised me during our discussions was the revelation that
> Groff is (apparently) optimized for authoring man pages.  I am personally
> interested in *roff as a typesetting system for technical documentatio in
> general.
> 
> I do agree with the other folk/s in this thread who have said that learning
> La/TeX is _much_ more advantageous as a _practical_ tool for writing maths
> and CS manuscripts.
> 
> I spent about 20 years buried in LaTeX during the academic phase of my life.
> I don't miss it now but there was no way to collaborate and publish using a
> typesetting setting other than LaTeX because nothing else has that kind of
> commonality.
> 
> My field was signal processing, especially as applied to multimedia: music
> and audio specifically.  I would not have been able to write my PhD
> dissertation or write _any_ journal/conference articles without knowning
> LaTeX.
> 
> One thing that helped significantly is that I am an Emacs user.  This comes
> with AUCTeX mode, which, when set up properly, makes LaTeX tolerable for
> me.[1]
> 
> I now have the freedom to choose *roff for presentational markup for
> personal technical documentation.  I have also joined a project that uses
> DocBook for semantic markup.
> 
> But when one needs to collaborate in academia, and if one wants to minimize
> friction when communicating, then LaTeX (or sometimes even MS Word) is the
> standard that one's colleagues in maths, CS, and software engineering will
> use.  Don't be "that person" who causes friction unnecessarily; there are
> plenty more important hills to die on.
> 
> One tool I *highly* recommend learning well is Pandoc.  This is wonderful
> for translating between markup formats and even rendering output well.
> 
> When I would send end-of-week updates to managers, I would often convert new
> documentation that was contained within a restricted repository to PDF
> format and attach that to my email updates as well.
> 
> (Just in case there were permissions issues.  For example, corporate
> enterprise firewalls are notoriously difficult to make connections through.
> They can make the documents even more difficult to access from their
> upstream repositories, and nobody want to be messing around with these kinds
> of permissions issues on a Friday afternoon.)
> 
> Andrew
> 
> [1] LaTeX is excellent compared to Markdown.  You can build a career on top
> of it but not on top of Markdown.  I don't even consider MD a proper markup
> format, aside from the simplest cases such as writing introductory README.md
> files.  The only thing that La/TeX and MD have in common for me is that they
> are both intolerable without Emacs modes (AUCTeX and markdown-down.el).
> -- 
> OpenPGP key: EB28 0338 28B7 19DA DAB0  B193 D21D 996E 883B E5B9

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