Learn: Ancient troff sources vs. modern-day groff

You really can't appreciate troff (and runoff and scribe) unless you do all of your document preparation on a fixed width font 24 line by 80 column terminal :-)

If you force yourself to do all of your work in that environment for a few months you can get a really good understanding of why the Xerox Star, Sun-1, and the Macintosh were so amazingly cool to people.

I learned troff/groff pretty recently. Two reasons: 1) I hate WYSIWYG with the passion of a thousand suns, but sometimes you need pretty documents; 2) troff is a fast, tiny, ubiquitous tool.

I found that the existing macro packages (such as Mom) can produce beautiful documents, but they are limited to the specific types of documents for which they were created. Going "against the grain" of a macro package is nothing but pain and heartache.

A macro package can be learned in an hour.

Without existing macro packages, troff source is just control lines and text lines. It can be learned in a day or two. The "Troff User's Manual" technical report by Ossanna and Kernighan (yes, THAT Kernighan) is very readable.

* NOT A STORAGE FORMAT *

Troff (with or without macros) is meant to be read as a stream, top-down, producing a formatted document split into pages on the fly. Its formatting structure was not meant for specifying semantics or using the document outside of troff.

Therefore I think troff can be a wonderful output format. Its battle-tested tools are capable of directly generating, say, PDFs. But I'm personally not going to write anything I want to keep directly in troff.

Jeez, now I need to go write that *roff_mom backend for acsciidoctor...

Edit: unwanted italics via asterisks - the irony!

It's funny to call groff "modern".

Nothing wrong with using it, it's just that it's nearly three decades old, which in software terms is pretty much ancient. troff was newer when groff was created than groff is today (~26 vs ~27 years, if WikiPedia is to be believed). So...I think it's more reasonable to say "extremely ancient troff sources vs. slightly less ancient groff".

From the title I thought the article would be about comparing the troff source to the groff source. But, it wasn't.

Troff isn't that bad once you spend a bit of time familiarizing yourself with the syntax - and possibly buildings your own abstractions on top of the available macro packages, -ms works but... SH? NH? .NaH. Or build a new one from scratch if you feel masochistic enough (not that I would know anything about it, nossiree).

It's lightweight (I like to think the feather typesetting-Anubis uses weights a bit more), fast, produces a decent output, and it is simple enough you can use it to make shell scripts spit out pdfs.

Troff is great! I started typesetting books in troff, then tried Lout, then LaTeX, and finally came back to troff. It's simple, flexible, predictable, and can typeset formulae, pictures, and tables (via eqn, pic, tbl). I would not want to trade it for anything else!

It probably would have been a good idea to use plan 9 troff for this. It's a descendant of the original troff while groff is a reimplementation...and I have noticed the output of groff looks a bit different.

I've had similar nightmares involving LaTeX.

I keep saying I want to learn groff - but it does nothing but win me geek points - I can make documents that look almost as nice in a modern WYSIWYG word processor.

That is an awesomely cool set of rotating header images. I've also already wasted a few minutes trying to track down which Ulitma map that is to no avail.

Troff: not even once.