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I was delighted to discover a full chapter dedicated to troff in a textbook I picked up on Berkeley Unix. Raw documents written in troff (the ones that I’ve seen) seem so quaint. Like little homemade chicken pot pies.

I’m mixed on the state of desktop publishing today. I’m missing that quaintness.

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I wasn't aware there was a state of desktop publishing today. DTP has mostly been superseded by the web. DIY amateur print of posters and such is more likely to be hammered together in Word than in Indesign.

Design agencies still do design-for-print, but there's usually an integrated workflow of some kind which means web and print assets - including styles - can be shared and reused.

It's a long way from the blocky output of a 300dpi laser in the early 90s assembled on a PC running a $50 DTP suite.

The sad thing about Postscript is that it could have been the foundation of the web, which would have made web and print integration much simpler and design more straightforward and consistent.

Instead we got the sprawling incoherent catastrophe that is HTML/CSS/js for the web, PDF for most other document-ish things, and Epub (which is a dumbed down and DRM'd version of HTML etc) for digital book publishing.

> DIY amateur print of posters and such is more likely to be hammered together in Word than in Indesign.

Word? I should be so lucky! The bane of my life is people preparing print jobs in Powerpoint!

Powerpoint! I should me so lucky. I was once passed an Excel spreadsheet where my colleague had layed out a flowchart! True story.

I once received a website redesign mock-up made in Excel. Ingenious.

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