Mike Bianchi: > [...] To do even the simplest document requires > much-too-much expertise for the rank beginner. > > What is missing is a Front Door that leads you > gently into the Castle, teaches you the way > through the rooms, closets and pantries, so you > can live comfortably there with what is present. > Then (and only then) should you be led down into > the basement and shown how the electric, water, > heat and sewage utilities work. Finally you > should go into the workshop and start building > your own mechanisms.
This approach to learning Groff would only work if there were a simple, high-level and self-contained set of macros that would hide the underlying mecha- nisms perfectly well, sparing the user the need to intefere with the low-level stuff. This would be a full new layer on top of Groff, like LaTeX is built on top of TeX and may be used without ever resorting to TeX. Besides, this is like applying theorems without understanding their proofs. From my own experince, the existing packages are much stronger coupled with Groff and cannot be used without good understanding of Groff itself. I didn't try mom though. What I was missing the most in the beginning was a Groff tutorial that would deliver information in learning order, as opposed to reference order, as the info manual does. Anton