Re: [Groff] drawing a figure

[Ted Harding]

On 10-Feb-00 Weiguang Shi wrote:
> Hi, there:
>     Nowadays, it seems there are less people using groff, or troff.
> Most people in my department are using Latex, MS word, etc. I myself
> used MS word on PC before, but since I switched to Unix, I want to use
> groff, after I read one of Stevens' books which says the real Unix
> books are written using troff. 
> 
>     I am wondering why (or whether) groff/troff is no longer popular.
> And I'd like to know the strength and weekness of these different
> publishing applications.

Big question, no straightforward answer.

Groff/troff is mainly still popular with people who learned to use it
before TeX became big. What made TeX (and LaTeX etc) big was, in the
first place, two things.

1: For mathematical texts it offered more in the way of fancy symbols and
fonts, and well-calculated layout, than troff did; as a result, it was
initially adopted enthusiastically by the mathematical world (even by many
troff enthusiasts). Also by computer scientists. Knuth's famous three
volumes "The Art of Computer Programing" had their later editions
typeset in TeX, and everybody was impressed (but then Knuth is an artist
in the field, and one of his life's aims is to "port centuries of
book typesetting experience to the computer"). Although the creators
of troff were very good at typesetting, Knuth was superb.

2: Following on from (1), a huge and accessible body of documentation
on how to use TeX and derivatives grew up. Then the growing mass of
people using TeX themselves began extending it (LaTeX, AMSTeX, musixtex,
tex-xet (bi-directional for Hebrew/Arabic etc) and so on).

Nevertheless, groff/troff is in many ways much easier to use, and
more compact and concise, than raw TeX, which is one of the reasons
many people never seriously changed, If groff had macro packages on
the scale of LaTeX and other TeX extensions, it would be a very serious
competitor.

There are also some things which are still done marginally better
in groff; and until quite recently groff was better for tables,
diagrams, and imported graphics (though TeX has now at least caught up).

Some might claim that TeX's indexing and bibliography facilities
are better than groff's; and this is true if you don't look outside
the relatively primitive facilities provided with groff. But you can
also arrange to use the same programs (makeindex and bib) in groff
as TeX does, with equally good effect. So that's not an argument.

As to what published books are typeset in groff/troff, there are many.
Most of the O'Reilly computer books are typeset using groff,
Also (and you might not have suspected this) most of the splendid
Collins Dictionaries are typeset using troff (admittedly in a batch
mode, from source text initially in XML).

There's more groff/troff usage out there than one initially suspects,
but a lot of it is much more hidden than most of the TeX usage is.

Ted.

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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <address@hidden>
Date: 10-Feb-00                                       Time: 23:31:37
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