Re: man(7), hyphen, and minus

[Deri]

On Saturday, 24 December 2022 01:26:22 GMT Richard Morse wrote:
> > I've been curious: how much use do you see of groff outside of man pages?
> 
> I realize I’m just one person, but my use of groff (and Heirloom for using
> useful fonts) is entirely outside of man pages…
> 
> Ricky

At the start of 2000s I setup a company to produce client output for financial 
institutions. It was all done with groff, but with my own frontend which 
produced low level troff code, i.e. not using any macro packages. This proved 
to be much faster than any commercial product at the time. It included various 
graphs and piecharts (now as macro package busgrap) customised for each 
separate client. The financial institution would send csv files and I would 
produce both monochrome (for printing, colour was too expensive at the time) 
and colour pdfs for loading onto their client portal. (Which led to me writing 
gropdf).

I was producing millions of pages quarterly, and rather than selling the 
software to the companies (which would have required manuals and a helpdesk), 
I sold it as a service, charging a click license based on the number of pages 
produced.

Cheers

Deri