Re: "Writing my PhD using groff"

[DJ Chase]

On Sat Jul 23, 2022 at 10:08 PM EDT, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2022-07-23T18:30:22-0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > Sadly, almost all of the papers were submitted in LaTex.  I think the
> > reasons were
 
> > (b) troff was locked up and the docs were locked for a long time.
>
> I don't think the lack of availability of troff source mattered much
> since groff had been out for 10 years by then, but the lack of
> documentation surely did.  I don't think Trent Fisher contributed the
> first cut of our Texinfo manual for another few years, and creating
> replacements for the original CSRC ms papers documenting various aspects
> of the system is a project that remains underway (hence why I went
> looking for Ted Harding recently).

I’ve never read the Texinfo manual; I learned *roff through Unix For
People,[1] then various online materials maybe half a year ago. The
turn-off for me was how cryptic all of the troff examples (from any
source) I saw were, and how it felt like I was always fighting the
typesetter to get it to do even basic things.

If not for my strangely-intense desire to do things ‘the Unix way’, I
would not have continued with troff to eventually find MOM (which I
now love).

[1]: https://archive.org/details/unixforpeoplemod00birn

Cheers,
-- 
DJ Chase
They, Them, Theirs