[TUHS] [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"

[TUHS] [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"

[Doug McIlroy]

>  troff has a substantial history.  Significant
changes in troff could invalidate most of the old documents leaving troff
with no usage base, and a poor tool at rendering all of the troff documents
out there.

As a living example, I have troff files from as far back as 1975 that
still work, and perhaps some even older that have lost their dates due
to careless copying.  The only incompatibility with groff is easy to
fix: inserting a space before the arguments of a troff request. The
few other incompatibilities I've encouuntered have been graciously
corrected by groff maintainers. You get no such help for old Word files.

doug

[TUHS] [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"

[Jon Steinhart]

Doug McIlroy writes:
> >  troff has a substantial history.  Significant
> changes in troff could invalidate most of the old documents leaving troff
> with no usage base, and a poor tool at rendering all of the troff documents
> out there.
> 
> As a living example, I have troff files from as far back as 1975 that
> still work, and perhaps some even older that have lost their dates due
> to careless copying.  The only incompatibility with groff is easy to
> fix: inserting a space before the arguments of a troff request. The
> few other incompatibilities I've encouuntered have been graciously
> corrected by groff maintainers. You get no such help for old Word files.
> 
> doug

Ah, troff.  It was my introduction to UNIX.  I was working in 2C-217 and
there was a PDP-11/45 across the hall running UNIX Version III.  I used
it to write the documentation for the GLANCE-G software.

I still use troff for my work.  I charge clients a word-penalty if they
want docs in that format because it's so much harder to use.  One of the
main reasons that I like troff is that I find that having to think about
formatting while writing interferes with my writing process.  Also, I can
seldom get word to make a table come out the way that I want like I can
with tbl.  And not being an artist, I can't drawing figures without pic.
One of the unsung great things about pic is the way that one can create
a scaffold of invisible objects behind a drawing so that pieces can be
moved and scaled easily.

My current big annoyance is that my publisher has a word/adobe process and
won't accept troff.  I have hacked together a script that converts my macros
into openoffice XML which gets me most of the way there.  Part of what it
does is export all of the tables and figures to separate files, runs them
through, converts them to PDF and then to SVG which is the only non-bitmap
form that can be imported.

The groff folks did a great job of maintaining compatibility.  My wish list
for changes is pretty small.  It would be nice to have some additional
features in pic.  And it would be good to be able to use any Unicode character.
And, it would be cool to have an option for two-dimensional page formatting
optimization ala TeX.

Jon

[TUHS] [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"

[Nemo]

On 4 September 2017 at 11:45, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu>
wrote (in part):
 You get no such help for old Word files.

Off-topic but I find that members of the StarOffice lineage can read
older files of almost anything.

N.

[TUHS] [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"

[ron minnich]

I've found it weird to say the least that usenix doesn't accept troff, but
will take Word documents.

The plan 9 troff pipeline is still quite complete. A few years back Russ
Cox pointed out that new CPUs were so fast that running a statically-linked
troff pipeline to process a paper was pretty much instantaneous.

He was right and, for a few years, for tech papers, I just switched back to
troff/tbl/pic/grap and friends. It was nice.

ron
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[TUHS] [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> On Sep 4, 2017, at 11:28 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> The groff folks did a great job of maintaining compatibility.  My wish list
> for changes is pretty small.  It would be nice to have some additional
> features in pic.  And it would be good to be able to use any Unicode character.

The Plan9 *roffs handle UTF-8 natively.  I thought the Heirloom Tools version of troff had been extended to do so as well?  But I have never used the latter, so what do I know ...

[TUHS] [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon at orthanc.ca> wrote:
 |> On Sep 4, 2017, at 11:28 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
 |> The groff folks did a great job of maintaining compatibility.  My \
 |> wish list
 |> for changes is pretty small.  It would be nice to have some additional
 |> features in pic.  And it would be good to be able to use any Unicode \
 |> character.
 |
 |The Plan9 *roffs handle UTF-8 natively.  I thought the Heirloom Tools \
 |version of troff had been extended to do so as well?  But I have never \
 |used the latter, so what do I know ...

The groff list had some interesting ideas how this could be
achieved for groff, too.  And those tools can UTF-8 input.
They also can other things, if you go for using them.  They can
not generate the output for my (simple) macros that these generate
for groff, the traps do not work the same, but i never really
digged into that.  They can also TrueType fonts.  And they have
a nice simple build system.  All this would be great to have for
groff.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

[TUHS] [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 4:25 PM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've found it weird to say the least that usenix doesn't accept troff, but
> will take Word documents.
>
> The plan 9 troff pipeline is still quite complete. A few years back Russ
> Cox pointed out that new CPUs were so fast that running a statically-linked
> troff pipeline to process a paper was pretty much instantaneous.
>
> He was right and, for a few years, for tech papers, I just switched back
> to troff/tbl/pic/grap and friends. It was nice.
>

I used 'tbl' at work the other day and sent the results to Ron in an email;
it was nice that it "just worked."

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"

[Nemo]

On 05/09/2017, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 4:25 PM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I've found it weird to say the least that usenix doesn't accept troff,
>> but will take Word documents.
>>
>> The plan 9 troff pipeline is still quite complete. A few years back Russ
>> Cox pointed out that new CPUs were so fast that running a
>> statically-linked
>> troff pipeline to process a paper was pretty much instantaneous.
>>
>> He was right and, for a few years, for tech papers, I just switched back
>> to troff/tbl/pic/grap and friends. It was nice.
>>
>
> I used 'tbl' at work the other day and sent the results to Ron in an email;
> it was nice that it "just worked."
>
>         - Dan C.

I may written this before but Tanenbaum, in his many prefaces, praises
troff and states that all his books are written with troff.

N.


>

[TUHS] [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"

[Steve Johnson]

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One of the interesting thing that troff lled to in Unix was stderr!  
Initially, Unix had stdin and stdout, but no stderr. We had a
phototypesetter that worked by flashing pictures of the various
letters on photosensitive paper.  It came out in a roll that had to
be fed into a developer and when it emerged it had to be cut into
pages manually.   Several months after we got the phototypesetter
somebody (The Hunt brothers?) cornered the market for silver, and the
cost of the developer shot through the roof.   We were asked to cut
back on our use of the phototypesetter, and we tried to do so.One day,
I was attempting to print out a one-page document.  I ran troff piped
into the phototypesetter and got out my roll of paper and fed it into
the developer.  Out the other end came a page with only one line on
it (beautifully typeset): "cannot open input file xxx"   A number of
others had similar experiences, and stderr was born...
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[TUHS] [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"

[Jon Steinhart]

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"Steve Johnson" writes:
>   One of the interesting thing that troff lled to in Unix was stderr!  
>   Initially, Unix had stdin and stdout, but no stderr.
>
>   We had a phototypesetter that worked by flashing pictures of the various
>   letters on photosensitive paper.  It came out in a roll that had to be fed
>   into a developer and when it emerged it had to be cut into pages manually.
>     Several months after we got the phototypesetter somebody (The Hunt
>   brothers?) cornered the market for silver, and the cost of the developer
>   shot through the roof.   We were asked to cut back on our use of the
>   phototypesetter, and we tried to do so.
>
>   One day, I was attempting to print out a one-page document.  I ran troff
>   piped into the phototypesetter and got out my roll of paper and fed it into
>   the developer.  Out the other end came a page with only one line on it
>   (beautifully typeset): "cannot open input file xxx"   A number of others
>   had similar experiences, and stderr was born...

Ah, the C/A/T.  Responsible from some of the squirrelly aspects of troff
like font positions.

[TUHS] [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"

[Ronald Natalie]

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> On Sep 5, 2017, at 11:06 PM, Steve Johnson <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:
> 
> One day, I was attempting to print out a one-page document.  I ran troff piped into the phototypesetter and got out my roll of paper and fed it into the developer.  Out the other end came a page with only one line on it (beautifully typeset): "cannot open input file xxx"   A number of others had similar experiences, and stderr was born…
I hear you.   Postscript lacked the concept as well.   I remember spending bucks on a phototypesetter run just to find an error message as the only thing on print run.

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