On Fri, Dec 14, 2007, Michael Kerpan wrote: > ...that groff/troff seems to be written off by so many as "obsolete" > and "only useful for man pages", despite the fact that it can do > everything that TeX/LaTeX (seemingly the favored non-WYSIWYG document > processor) can do but while taking up 3 megabytes (as opposed to the > 300 or so used by the average TeX install) It can't be ease of use, as > *roff plus -me, -mm or -ms is no harder to use than LaTeX or HTML. It > can't be availability as the *roff family is basically a required > component of any Unix-like system. It can't even be font support, > given that it's MUCH easier to install and use random PostScript fonts > in groff than in TeX... What gives and how can we fix it? >
The reasons why I changed to LaTeX after 25 years with troff/groff: 1. Scientific and technical publishers accept (and even expect) LaTeX for tehcnical papers and books. Few if any will accept troff. [For me, this reason trumps all the rest, but it might be unimportant for others.] 2. There are nice "front-ends" to LaTeX (LyX is what I use, but Bokoma and others compete). This not only makes things easier for me, but allows me to collaborate with co-authors who are not willing to learn either troff or LaTeX. My experience is that there really is an "ease of use" consideration here. 3. I find making a table of contents and index easier with LaTeX packages, and there are things like hyperref that really assist in making pdf files. Maybe I am missing something, but groff seems only to really know about postscript, whereas LaTeX packages have a lot of "pdf-smarts" as well. Of course, this somewhat begs the question: why did all this happen in the first place (e.g. why aren't there front-ends and pdf-packages for troff)? ...my two cents...dave case