Re: [Groff] Why is it...

[David A. Case]

On Fri, Dec 14, 2007, Michael Kerpan wrote:

> ...that groff/troff seems to be written off by so many as "obsolete"
> and "only useful for man pages", despite the fact that it can do
> everything that TeX/LaTeX (seemingly the favored non-WYSIWYG document
> processor) can do but while taking up 3 megabytes (as opposed to the
> 300 or so used by the average TeX install) It can't be ease of use, as
> *roff plus -me, -mm or -ms is no harder to use than LaTeX or HTML. It
> can't be availability as the *roff family is basically a required
> component of any Unix-like system. It can't even be font support,
> given that it's MUCH easier to install and use random PostScript fonts
> in groff than in TeX... What gives and how can we fix it?
> 

The reasons why I changed to LaTeX after 25 years with troff/groff:

1.  Scientific and technical publishers accept (and even expect) LaTeX
    for tehcnical papers and books.  Few if any will accept troff.  [For
    me, this reason trumps all the rest, but it might be unimportant for
    others.]

2.  There are nice "front-ends" to LaTeX (LyX is what I use, but Bokoma and
    others compete).  This not only makes things easier for me, but allows
    me to collaborate with co-authors who are not willing to learn either
    troff or LaTeX.  My experience is that there really is an "ease of use"
    consideration here.

3.  I find making a table of contents and index easier with LaTeX packages,
    and there are things like hyperref that really assist in making pdf
    files.  Maybe I am missing something, but groff seems only to really know
    about postscript, whereas LaTeX packages have a lot of "pdf-smarts"
    as well.

Of course, this somewhat begs the question: why did all this happen in the
first place (e.g. why aren't there front-ends and pdf-packages for troff)?

...my two cents...dave case