Re: "Writing my PhD using groff"

[DJ Chase]

On Sun Jul 24, 2022 at 4:57 PM EDT, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 24, 2022 at 08:42:32PM +0000, DJ Chase wrote:
> >   1. People might need to read the documentation for a format’s tools
> >      before they can read files in that format (this isn’t the case for
> >      Groff specifically, but a manual page isn’t always the best
> >      introduction)
>
> All of the original documentation for the Unix [nt]roff were written in
> troff.  I don't remember any man pages, it was all papers, there was 
> the [nt]roff paper, one for eqn, another for pic, another for tbl,
> one for each of the macro packages.  I still have the set of them
> that I bought at the UW-Madison computing store around 1982.
>
> There may have been man pages but that would have just been about how
> you called the various programs.

Man pages are written in roff with the man/mdoc macros, which is why one
wouldn’t need to use the Groff tools to read documentation written in
roff.

Cheers,
-- 
DJ Chase
They, Them, Theirs