Re: [Groff] gropdf and pdfroff

[Anton Shepelev]

Mike Bianchi:

> [...]   To  do even the simplest document requires
> much-too-much expertise for the rank beginner.
>
> What is missing is a Front  Door  that  leads  you
> gently  into  the  Castle,  teaches  you  the  way
> through the rooms, closets and  pantries,  so  you
> can  live  comfortably there with what is present.
> Then (and only then) should you be led  down  into
> the  basement  and  shown how the electric, water,
> heat  and  sewage  utilities  work.   Finally  you
> should  go  into  the  workshop and start building
> your own mechanisms.

This approach to learning Groff would only  work  if
there  were  a simple, high-level and self-contained
set of macros that would hide the underlying  mecha-
nisms  perfectly  well, sparing the user the need to
intefere with the low-level stuff. This would  be  a
full  new layer on top of Groff, like LaTeX is built
on top of TeX and may be used without ever resorting
to  TeX.  Besides,  this  is  like applying theorems
without understanding their proofs.

From my own experince,  the  existing  packages  are
much  stronger coupled with Groff and cannot be used
without good understanding of Groff itself. I didn't
try mom though.

What  I  was missing the most in the beginning was a
Groff tutorial that  would  deliver  information  in
learning  order,  as  opposed to reference order, as
the info manual does.

Anton