Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[John Labovitz <johnl@johnlabovitz.com>]

On Jan 11, 2022, at 00:12, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:

> For a time perspective, this was 1987, before O'Reilly and Associates
> was founded.  But the macros they (also, primarily, Dale Dougherty)
> described there are the basis for the macros they used at ORA when I
> started writing for them in 1993.  Some time round the turn of the
> millennium they then migrated to DocBook, at least for the author
> interface.  I think that they had some magic to then convert it to
> groff.  So I don't think it was "too late"; the DocBook conversion
> suggests that the authors didn't like groff, though I thought that the
> conversion was a retrograde step.

I think I can help fill out this puzzle. I started working for O’Reilly (specifically, for Dale) in late 1993, around the time the *roff -> DocBook/SGML transition was happening. I was hired to help develop Global Network Navigator, the first commercial website. Initially I created the first web ads (sorry) and later I was technical director of GNN.

I recall that it wasn’t so much that people ‘didn’t like’ groff and its ilk, but that Tim and Dale realized that the future of publishing was going to be something far beyond simply print books, and they needed their content to have much more inherent structure and metadata than was offered by groff markup — whose purpose was primarily as a markup language for print.

So the solution (as I observed it when I was there) was to translate the raw groff into a more abstract, structural markup — namely, SGML using the DocBook schema — and then to write conversion tools that would then re-generate groff, HTML, or something else. (The web/HTML was not necessarily the only future at that time!) That workflow also allowed manuscripts to be imported from other platforms (like Word) from authors who weren’t part of the Unix world, as O’Reilly branched out from strict Unix manuals into travel, finance, and other diverse worlds of content.

For example, we were able to fairly easily republish the seminal _Whole Internet Catalog_ book as a major section of the GNN website, using commercial SGML->HTML tools plus a whole lotta Perl. :)

—John