Re: Learning troff - where to start?

[John Gardner]

>
> I learned troff entirely from ctsr54.  It is not for nothing that
> it remains the canonical starting point for exploring groff.


I strongly second this. Newcomers should at least be comfortable changing
fonts, adjusting margins, and controlling paragraph filling/adjustment.
Then they'll move on to macros, strings, and registers. After that, the
difference between macros and requests will be obvious; Users will also
realise why macro packages are there in the first place — the Roff language
is too cumbersome for everyday document preparation.

When I first learned to use Groff, I was confused over the differences
between .Sh / .SH, .TH / .Dt, .B / \fB … "overlapping" features I assumed
were all part of the same opaque format (one designed specifically for man
page display). Now, had I started with CSTR #54 instead of man page
tutorials <https://liw.fi/manpages/>, I might've learned early on that
Troff *isn't* merely simply a backend for man(1), that man(7) and mdoc(7)
are exclusive of each other, and tbl(1) markup *wasn't* part of the Roff
language. Can you imagine how confused I was before I learned about
preprocessors?

IMHO, mastering Troff is less about knowing what each part does, and more
about where/how each part fits with everything else.





On Wed, 14 Oct 2020 at 12:10, Peter Schaffter <peter@schaffter.ca> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 14, 2020, Damian McGuckin wrote:
> > How many people use features of 'groff' that are not in 'troff'?
>
> The mom macros rely heavily on extensions to groff that were
> implemented during Werner's term.  Since many (most?) new groff
> users these days gravitate towards mom, I'd say quite a lot of
> people rely on those features.
>
> I learned troff entirely from ctsr54.  It is not for nothing that
> it remains the canonical starting point for exploring groff.
>
> Prentice-Hall published _Troff Typesetting for UNIX Systems_
> (Emerson, Paulsel) in 1987.  It's still available online.  It might
> be the very thing the OP is looking for.
>
> --
> Peter Schaffter
> https://www.schaffter.ca
>
>