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