On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 02:34:26PM +0000, Tuomo Valkonen wrote: > On 2007-03-20, Joerg van den Hoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > a) `groff' is not ancient at all and still actively maintained (`groff' is > > actually more recent than TeX). > > The command set and syntax are from the 1950s or something, when you make that the 1970ies, a bit newer than C than... > had to to write it all on a punchcard. You can't make heads or tails of and make that a pdp11, I think > it just by looking at the file; you have to look at the documentation. what file? the markupped text? I don't think that `ms' markup is harder (or easier) to understand than latex markup. for the macro definitions themselves: yeah, that's sort of crazy (but probably the low level TeX stuff does not look better). looking at the documentation as a prerequisite of generating a sensible document: would you say that is different from latex???
> That doesn't lend to random contributors improving the documentation. tell me: where is the difference between `-ms' and `-man' markup in terms of your points (random contributors don't understand it, 'old', etc)? > LaTeX, on the other hand, has commands that are understandable when > you look at the document, even if you didn't know how to write a LaTeX > document from scratch. Too bad LaTeX documents are hardly understandable > by other programs, them being programs themselves. same thing with groff (being a program), of course. so: you know how to use latex, I know how to use groff. that seems the basic difference. concerning "understanding" the latex source: I will give you that latex markup is much more verbose (which I don't like: I have to type it or make lots of vi shortcuts or what else) and therefore one could easier guess that \begin{paragraph} is just that, than that .LP (for left adjusted paragraph) does just the same in `groff -ms'. but the 10 odd pages I sent around concering use of `ms' seem to compare rather favourably to the length of the average latex guide... > > > I think it would'nt harm if one > > would not loose this option without better reasons than that the tutorial > > would simply not pop up via `man tutorial'. > > I still think that using such arcane formats as *roff is pointless, > unless you're writing a man page. > I still think you are wrong but will leave it at that. but hey, guys, why not, at least put this in a file `tutorial.txt`: .\"---------------------------------------------------------------------------- .TL ion3 tutorial .AU some_guy .AI some_institution .NH Introduction .LP is going here .NH keybindings .LP can be found here in a nice table: .\"------------------------------- .TS box center tab(;); l l. key;action _ F1;access manpages F2;xterm .TE .\"------------------------------- .NH customizing your statusbar .LP can be tough. .NH 2 statusbar: the basic layout .LP is here .NH 2 statusbar: extensions .LP are here .\"---------------------------------------------------------------------------- things to memorize to 'read' the above: `.\"' -- is the admittedly strange start_of_comment . `.TL' -- title `.AU' -- author `.AI' -- author's institution `.NH' -- starts new numbered section header (trailing number is section level) `.LP' -- starts new leftjustified paragraph, `.TS/.TE' -- brackets tables ('table start', 'table end') now issue : 1. `groff -t -ms tutorial.txt > tutorial.ps; gv tutorial.ps' 2. `groff -t -ms -TX100 tutorial.txt' 3. `nroff -t -ms tutorial.txt' and look (and compare with what you need to achieve approx. the same with `-man' or `latex' (where latex is not an option if one wants to maintain formatting into the terminal)). my vote: best solution: use `ms' second best solution: use `man' joerg