From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.2 (2018-09-13) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS, MAILING_LIST_MULTI,RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.2 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (minnie.tuhs.org [45.79.103.53]) by inbox.vuxu.org (OpenSMTPD) with ESMTP id 23dc61a4 for ; Fri, 4 Oct 2019 19:02:32 +0000 (UTC) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id D4AD89BCFD; Sat, 5 Oct 2019 05:02:30 +1000 (AEST) Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A1C049BBCF; Sat, 5 Oct 2019 05:02:10 +1000 (AEST) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 93AF49BBCF; Sat, 5 Oct 2019 05:02:08 +1000 (AEST) Received: from mcvoy.com (mcvoy.com [192.169.23.250]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id F1E8A948D7 for ; Sat, 5 Oct 2019 05:02:07 +1000 (AEST) Received: by mcvoy.com (Postfix, from userid 3546) id 8395135E0A8; Fri, 4 Oct 2019 12:02:07 -0700 (PDT) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2019 12:02:07 -0700 From: Larry McVoy To: U'll Be King of the Stars Message-ID: <20191004190207.GA6882@mcvoy.com> References: <20191004042034.GS13997@mcvoy.com> <20191004145750.GA1466863@lap> <4ba947af-00c7-53ee-046a-3b6306e5d1f0@andrewnesbit.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4ba947af-00c7-53ee-046a-3b6306e5d1f0@andrewnesbit.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.24 (2015-08-30) Subject: Re: [TUHS] eqn X-BeenThere: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.26 Precedence: list List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Cc: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "TUHS" 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