Re: [Groff] Why is it...

[Robert Thorsby]

On 15/12/07 04:25:40, Michael Kerpan wrote:
> ...that groff/troff seems to be written
> off by so many as "obsolete" ...

IMO it is all a matter of perceptions. People think that a 30 year old 
application that, even today, does not have a GUI **must** be obsolete.

Add to this, *roff does not conform to The Debian Way (which includes 
derivatives, such as *buntu). This means that *roff is deprecated, and 
therefore obsolete. Note, often *buntu does not include man pages for 
many applications, even when the man pages are particularly well 
documented, thus **proving** that *roff is obsolete.

Also, *roff is not written in p... .Notwithstanding that manipulation 
of a raw *roff file is easily done in any programming or scripting 
language, a lot of people are unaware that beautiful postscript output 
can be produced by running the output from another application through 
a script.

There are no modern textbooks on *roff. The three I have are about 20 
years old. How many people are aware of the accompanying documentation 
to Peter's mom macros?

Finally, we are our own worst enemies. Those who inhabit this list, 
though incredibly polite and invariably helpful to newbies, are always 
posting about arcane subjects. The thread under discussion is the first 
"non-tech" posting in quite a while.

For example, was the matter of "final line justification" [forced 
justification, cosmetic justification] ever resolved? or did the thread 
just die out? Can a newbie (or me, for that matter) search the m/l 
archives to discover how to justify the last line of a justified 
paragraph?

I also remember another thread where the author of a children's book 
was advised to hack postscript in order to produce the final layout. 
That thread frightened me because the answer appeared to me (a non-
programmer) to be obvious -- the programmer gurus were looking for a 
programming solution to what was clearly an aesthetic problem.

To close with some balance, my first attempt at producing tide charts 
was done with considerable pain in LyX. These tide charts (the raw data 
for which is produced by David Flater's xtide program) are now 
assembled with a shell script into groff files from which superb 
postscript is produced.

Today, I use groff for everything, including business letters.

Robert Thorsby
How should I know if it works? That's what beta testers are for.
I only coded it. -- Linus Torvalds