Re: [Groff] Why is it...

[Peter Schaffter]

On Sat, Dec 22, 2007, Blake McBride wrote:
> Groff is so simple and strait forward in my experience.

I do believe that's the very first time I've ever heard someone
make that assertion. :)

> I think the big thing keeping people from making more use of Groff is the 
> macro packages.  mm, me, etc. are antiquated and too rudimentary in my 
> opinion.  mom is much better but still falls very short of LaTeX.  The 
> sectioning ability of LaTeX, for example, is an absolute necessity (you 
> know, chapters, sections, subsections, and subsubsections all related to 
> each other).  The are many other examples too.  I think that mom could be 
> brought up to speed, and that could make all the difference.

I agree that the classical macro packages belong to another age,
and that that's off-putting for many people (hence the mom
package).  Not so sure I agree it's "the big thing".  I suspect
rather it's a mindset problem.  Experienced *roffers are, by
nature, tinkerers.  They expect to get their hands dirty when they
encounter a situation not covered by their preferred macroset.

Typical scenario:

    You want sectioning?  Okay--here's the macro set that sort of
    does what you want.  Now all you have to do is modify this macro
    here, and that macro there, and write these new ones...

They/we expect to (and can) roll our own solutions to many
things, with the result that a monolithic macroset to cover every
possibility has never really been part of *roff thinking, which it
would have to be for *roff to gain widespread acceptance.


-- 
Peter Schaffter