Re: Readability of troff documents (Was: [Groff] Bug in gxditview)

[Larry Kollar]

> Troff is hard to read since ages but it may be better to read when 
> wisely formatted. I personally take the sed-way not only for \(em but 
> also for ligatures like \(fl and stuff. So it won't bother me and I'd 
> prefer to let it alone.

It's really not that hard to read, once you've become familiar with it. 
Having a syntax-highlighting text editor certainly helps, too. Even 
better, it's easy to *write* -- the short tags let you add them without 
the mental pause needed to type something like "itemize" when a simple 
.BL will do.

> Last, would you really tell that a non computer person nowadays uses 
> troff in any way? These even avoid LaTeX either (to my knowledge) and 
> use their favourite GUI and mouse appliction to create their docs.

There are a slew of free XML document processors under development; one 
or more of them will certainly get off the ground. Groff would make an 
excellent print engine for an XML document.

--
Larry Kollar     k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival"
http://home.alltel.net/kollar/utp/ (note new URL)