4 Oct
2019
4 Oct
'19
4:20 a.m.
So my kid is using LaTex and I'd like to show him what troff can do.
For the record, back when he was born, 20 years ago, I was program
chair for Linux Expo (which sounds like a big deal but all it meant
was I had the job of formatting the proceedings). LaTex was a big
deal but I pushed people towards troff and the few people that took
the push came back and said "holy crap is this easy".
My kid is a math guy, does anyone have some eqn input and output
that they can share?
Thanks,
--lm
4 Oct
4 Oct
4:35 a.m.
On Thu, 3 Oct 2019, Larry McVoy wrote:
So my kid is using LaTex and I'd like to show him
what troff can do. For
the record, back when he was born, 20 years ago, I was program chair for
Linux Expo (which sounds like a big deal but all it meant was I had the
job of formatting the proceedings). LaTex was a big deal but I pushed
people towards troff and the few people that took the push came back and
said "holy crap is this easy".
:-)
I've always liked software where the user is in charge, not whoever wrote
the tool. A boss of mine was into LaTeX, and I hated it.
My kid is a math guy, does anyone have some eqn input
and output that
they can share?
I've only ever used "neqn" and that was yonks ago, so I'd be
interested in
seeing some examples.
-- Dave
5:12 a.m.
I'm going to give a contrarian response. You may be wrong, and he
maybe should do LaTex.
Why?
because it's what his peer group, and professors, and other people
like markers and tutorial assisters will expect, and he can use things
like OverLeaf very probably on the Uni tab, which has shared edit, all
kinds of useful templates, and help communities.
You don't want to tie him to your apron strings, for help: He needs to
learn how to go out into the world and hassle other people for help
too!
My son, who is in the same kind-of cohort but perhaps 6years ahead,
wrote his thesis in OverLeaf and did very well in it.
The markup is XArchiV and journal friendly: His chances of getting
through peer review barriers which obsess with form, and not function
(sad) is better.
Sometimes, being the stand-out is not good. I was the only visible
Athiest in school and when I found a copy of the scots prayer book, it
was different page numbers and I couldn't find the hymn before they'd
finished singing it. I guess the example I am giving doesn't help my
own story because I am an essentially HAPPY athiest, but still: you
don't always want to be running against the stream.
If the maths is good, he's born to fly solo, and is heading into place
of excellence, none of this will matter. If he is looking to relate to
his community, it may.
On Fri, Oct 4, 2019 at 2:21 PM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
So my kid is using LaTex and I'd like to show him what troff can do.
For the record, back when he was born, 20 years ago, I was program
chair for Linux Expo (which sounds like a big deal but all it meant
was I had the job of formatting the proceedings). LaTex was a big
deal but I pushed people towards troff and the few people that took
the push came back and said "holy crap is this easy".
My kid is a math guy, does anyone have some eqn input and output
that they can share?
Thanks,
--lm
1:43 p.m.
On 04/10/2019, George Michaelson <ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote (in part):
I'm going to give a contrarian response. You may
be wrong, and he
maybe should do LaTex.
Why?
because it's what his peer group, and professors, and other people
like markers and tutorial assisters will expect, [...]
Pace Larry but I tend to agree with George here.
N.
2:57 p.m.
On Thu, Oct 03, 2019 at 09:20:34PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
My kid is a math guy, does anyone have some eqn input
and output
that they can share?
Have you tried (heard of) neatroff[1] and neateqn?
Neateqn uses TeX's algorithm for typesetting mathematical formulas.[2]
Here is an example: http://litcave.rudi.ir/neateqndemo.pdf
[1] http://litcave.rudi.ir/neatroff.pdf
[2] http://litcave.rudi.ir/neateqn.pdf
3:52 p.m.
On 04/10/2019 15:57, aksr wrote:
Have you tried (heard of) neatroff[1] and neateqn?
Neateqn uses TeX's algorithm for typesetting mathematical formulas.[2]
Here is an example: http://litcave.rudi.ir/neateqndemo.pdf
[1] http://litcave.rudi.ir/neatroff.pdf
[2] http://litcave.rudi.ir/neateqn.pdf
I have tried these and I have been in touch with the author. He was
very helpful.
One thing that surprised me during our discussions was the revelation
that Groff is (apparently) optimized for authoring man pages. I am
personally interested in *roff as a typesetting system for technical
documentatio in general.
I do agree with the other folk/s in this thread who have said that
learning La/TeX is _much_ more advantageous as a _practical_ tool for
writing maths and CS manuscripts.
I spent about 20 years buried in LaTeX during the academic phase of my
life. I don't miss it now but there was no way to collaborate and
publish using a typesetting setting other than LaTeX because nothing
else has that kind of commonality.
My field was signal processing, especially as applied to multimedia:
music and audio specifically. I would not have been able to write my
PhD dissertation or write _any_ journal/conference articles without
knowning LaTeX.
One thing that helped significantly is that I am an Emacs user. This
comes with AUCTeX mode, which, when set up properly, makes LaTeX
tolerable for me.[1]
I now have the freedom to choose *roff for presentational markup for
personal technical documentation. I have also joined a project that
uses DocBook for semantic markup.
But when one needs to collaborate in academia, and if one wants to
minimize friction when communicating, then LaTeX (or sometimes even MS
Word) is the standard that one's colleagues in maths, CS, and software
engineering will use. Don't be "that person" who causes friction
unnecessarily; there are plenty more important hills to die on.
One tool I *highly* recommend learning well is Pandoc. This is
wonderful for translating between markup formats and even rendering
output well.
When I would send end-of-week updates to managers, I would often convert
new documentation that was contained within a restricted repository to
PDF format and attach that to my email updates as well.
(Just in case there were permissions issues. For example, corporate
enterprise firewalls are notoriously difficult to make connections
through. They can make the documents even more difficult to access from
their upstream repositories, and nobody want to be messing around with
these kinds of permissions issues on a Friday afternoon.)
Andrew
[1] LaTeX is excellent compared to Markdown. You can build a career on
top of it but not on top of Markdown. I don't even consider MD a proper
markup format, aside from the simplest cases such as writing
introductory README.md files. The only thing that La/TeX and MD have in
common for me is that they are both intolerable without Emacs modes
(AUCTeX and markdown-down.el).
--
OpenPGP key: EB28 0338 28B7 19DA DAB0 B193 D21D 996E 883B E5B9
4:12 p.m.
One slightly OT fact about TeX. On my 16GB, Core i7, SATA SSD
Lenovo T430s laptop running Fedora 30, it takes ~3 seconds to run TeX on
the ~900 page TeXBook. That's pretty fast. TeX contains all kinds of
code to make it fit in the constraints of a 1980s computer. I wonder
whether a redesign for a 2020 computer would be faster or slower.
I suspect, but can't prove, that classic [nt]roff might also
benefit in the same way. groff was written latter, so it might
suffer less.
Jon
5:24 p.m.
A modern TeX would probably look a lot like SILE:
http://sile-typesetter.org/
Simon's a smart guy. It's a pretty neat project.
On Fri, Oct 4, 2019 at 9:13 AM Jon Forrest <nobozo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
One slightly OT fact about TeX. On my 16GB, Core i7, SATA SSD
Lenovo T430s laptop running Fedora 30, it takes ~3 seconds to run TeX on
the ~900 page TeXBook. That's pretty fast. TeX contains all kinds of
code to make it fit in the constraints of a 1980s computer. I wonder
whether a redesign for a 2020 computer would be faster or slower.
I suspect, but can't prove, that classic [nt]roff might also
benefit in the same way. groff was written latter, so it might
suffer less.
Jon
6:55 p.m.
On Fri, Oct 04, 2019 at 10:24:11AM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
A modern TeX would probably look a lot like SILE:
http://sile-typesetter.org/
Simon's a smart guy. It's a pretty neat project.
I always bristled at SILE being described as a typesetting program.
It's a desktop publishing suite. The whole advantage of roff and TeX is
that you're freed from micromanaging everything. SILE takes that base
from TeX, and then puts back in all the knobs that a certain kind of
person likes to fiddle with. This means if you're collaborating with
any sized group on a document, and you're using SILE, someone will turn
it into a figure-positioning bikeshedding competition.
khm
5:43 p.m.
Jon Forrest wrote in <389f5a69-e103-7ec3-9b95-3e6e294a86e6(a)gmail.com>om>:
|One slightly OT fact about TeX. On my 16GB, Core i7, SATA SSD
|Lenovo T430s laptop running Fedora 30, it takes ~3 seconds to run TeX on
|the ~900 page TeXBook. That's pretty fast. TeX contains all kinds of
|code to make it fit in the constraints of a 1980s computer. I wonder
|whether a redesign for a 2020 computer would be faster or slower.
It made a really huge difference whether you base upon the plain
TeX macros, maybe with epsf.tex for embedding .eps files, and
colordvi.tex for colors in slides, index and bibliography reviews
etc., or whether you use the huge LaTeX macros. Also lazy loading
fonts added upon that, i finally added that and it saved a 1-2
second hang upon program startup (plain tex plus ~250kb single
file macro, plus the mentioned included) for each and every letter
that was sent out.
% 00-05-31: new scheme to avoid waste. now a font is init only if it's used.
% 2Compare (Cyrix 166+, 49MB, Linux 2.2.13-12, X 3.3.5):
% | OLD | NEW |
% |-----------------------------------|---------------------------------------|
% | 1178 strings out of 13013 | 1413 strings out of 13013 |
% | 13106 string characters of 122154 | 17026 string characters of 122154 |
% | 35574 words of memory of 263001 | 54220 words of memory of 263001 |
% | 2086 multiletter of 10000+0 | 2321 multiletter of 10000+0 |
% | 80647 font info for 276 fonts | 20674 words of font info for 70 fonts |
% (out of 400000 for 1000)
|I suspect, but can't prove, that classic [nt]roff might also
|benefit in the same way. groff was written latter, so it might
|suffer less.
|
|Jon
--End of <389f5a69-e103-7ec3-9b95-3e6e294a86e6(a)gmail.com>
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
6 Oct
6 Oct
8:03 a.m.
Jon Forrest <nobozo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
One slightly OT fact about TeX. On my 16GB, Core i7,
SATA SSD
Lenovo T430s laptop running Fedora 30, it takes ~3 seconds to run TeX on
the ~900 page TeXBook. That's pretty fast.
You can thank Moore's Law for this. I remember trying to run TeX on
BSD 4.[12] vax with 4 Meg of memory and it taking many minutes to format
a single page.
The first time it became easy to run TeX, for me, was on sparcstation
class systems in the early 1990s.
TeX contains all kinds of
code to make it fit in the constraints of a 1980s computer. I wonder
whether a redesign for a 2020 computer would be faster or slower.
I think it's just compute-intensive code. Moern versions of TeX use
WebToC to translate Knuth's web/pascal code to C, and that has been
the case for a long time.
(As an aside, everyone here who's read "TeX: The Program", raise
you hand. [I have, but only once.])
I suspect, but can't prove, that classic [nt]roff
might also
benefit in the same way. groff was written latter, so it might
suffer less.
I don't think classic [nt]roff suffers at all. I remember (boy do I sound
like an old f*art) circa 1991, having both nroff and groff on a '486 class
system. nroff was noticeably faster at formatting man pages than
groff was. (Groff, of course, was ditroff and gave me PostScript output,
but comparing the two versions of nroff for text output, there
was a noticeable difference.)
Again, today, it doesn't really matter.
Arnold
4 Oct
4 Oct
7:02 p.m.
My complaint with LaTex et al is that it is escape based. Roff wants
stuff to start at the beginning of the line. Which mean Roff input will
version control *dramatically* better which leads to better collaboration.
My kid already knows Latex, I'd like him to try roff.
On Fri, Oct 04, 2019 at 04:52:29PM +0100, U'll Be King of the Stars wrote:
On 04/10/2019 15:57, aksr wrote:
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
Have you tried (heard of) neatroff[1] and
neateqn?
Neateqn uses TeX's algorithm for typesetting mathematical formulas.[2]
Here is an example: http://litcave.rudi.ir/neateqndemo.pdf
[1] http://litcave.rudi.ir/neatroff.pdf
[2] http://litcave.rudi.ir/neateqn.pdf
I have tried these and I have been in touch with the author. He was very
helpful.
One thing that surprised me during our discussions was the revelation that
Groff is (apparently) optimized for authoring man pages. I am personally
interested in *roff as a typesetting system for technical documentatio in
general.
I do agree with the other folk/s in this thread who have said that learning
La/TeX is _much_ more advantageous as a _practical_ tool for writing maths
and CS manuscripts.
I spent about 20 years buried in LaTeX during the academic phase of my life.
I don't miss it now but there was no way to collaborate and publish using a
typesetting setting other than LaTeX because nothing else has that kind of
commonality.
My field was signal processing, especially as applied to multimedia: music
and audio specifically. I would not have been able to write my PhD
dissertation or write _any_ journal/conference articles without knowning
LaTeX.
One thing that helped significantly is that I am an Emacs user. This comes
with AUCTeX mode, which, when set up properly, makes LaTeX tolerable for
me.[1]
I now have the freedom to choose *roff for presentational markup for
personal technical documentation. I have also joined a project that uses
DocBook for semantic markup.
But when one needs to collaborate in academia, and if one wants to minimize
friction when communicating, then LaTeX (or sometimes even MS Word) is the
standard that one's colleagues in maths, CS, and software engineering will
use. Don't be "that person" who causes friction unnecessarily; there are
plenty more important hills to die on.
One tool I *highly* recommend learning well is Pandoc. This is wonderful
for translating between markup formats and even rendering output well.
When I would send end-of-week updates to managers, I would often convert new
documentation that was contained within a restricted repository to PDF
format and attach that to my email updates as well.
(Just in case there were permissions issues. For example, corporate
enterprise firewalls are notoriously difficult to make connections through.
They can make the documents even more difficult to access from their
upstream repositories, and nobody want to be messing around with these kinds
of permissions issues on a Friday afternoon.)
Andrew
[1] LaTeX is excellent compared to Markdown. You can build a career on top
of it but not on top of Markdown. I don't even consider MD a proper markup
format, aside from the simplest cases such as writing introductory README.md
files. The only thing that La/TeX and MD have in common for me is that they
are both intolerable without Emacs modes (AUCTeX and markdown-down.el).
--
OpenPGP key: EB28 0338 28B7 19DA DAB0 B193 D21D 996E 883B E5B9 
7 Oct
7 Oct
5:26 p.m.
U'll Be King of the Stars writes:
On 04/10/2019 15:57, aksr wrote:
[1] LaTeX is excellent compared to Markdown. You can build a career
on top of it but not on top of Markdown. I don't even consider MD a
proper markup format, aside from the simplest cases such as writing
introductory README.md files. The only thing that La/TeX and MD have
in common for me is that they are both intolerable without Emacs modes
(AUCTeX and markdown-down.el).
[With sincere apologies for taking this slightly more off-topic, but
still within the realm of the vaguely UNIX-y...]
This is one of the reasons I live in Emacs, too. I make extensive use of
org-mode, not only for organizing my life, but also for generating
documentation. Org-mode has extensive native support for LaTeX markup,
and exporting marked-up documents to PDF via LaTeX. Additionally, of
course, it can export to HTML and even Markdown if you like. But the
LaTeX support makes it killer.
In fact, veering back on-topic, there is even a mode to export Org-mode
files to Groff Memorandum Macros documents[1]! It's a pretty powerful
system.
-Seth
[1] https://orgmode.org/worg/exporters/ox-groff.html
--
Seth Morabito
Poulsbo, WA, USA
web(a)loomcom.com
7:14 p.m.
And just in case you didn't know about it....
https://github.com/yjwen/org-reveal
This converts org-mode docs to reveal.js presentations.
https://athornton.github.io/Jupyter-PCW-2019/ is an example
On Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 10:36 AM Seth J. Morabito <web(a)loomcom.com> wrote:
U'll Be King of the Stars writes:
On 04/10/2019 15:57, aksr wrote:
[1] LaTeX is excellent compared to Markdown. You can build a career
on top of it but not on top of Markdown. I don't even consider MD a
proper markup format, aside from the simplest cases such as writing
introductory README.md files. The only thing that La/TeX and MD have
in common for me is that they are both intolerable without Emacs modes
(AUCTeX and markdown-down.el).
[With sincere apologies for taking this slightly more off-topic, but
still within the realm of the vaguely UNIX-y...]
This is one of the reasons I live in Emacs, too. I make extensive use of
org-mode, not only for organizing my life, but also for generating
documentation. Org-mode has extensive native support for LaTeX markup,
and exporting marked-up documents to PDF via LaTeX. Additionally, of
course, it can export to HTML and even Markdown if you like. But the
LaTeX support makes it killer.
In fact, veering back on-topic, there is even a mode to export Org-mode
files to Groff Memorandum Macros documents[1]! It's a pretty powerful
system.
-Seth
[1] https://orgmode.org/worg/exporters/ox-groff.html
--
Seth Morabito
Poulsbo, WA, USA
web(a)loomcom.com
8 Oct
8 Oct
9:11 p.m.
On Mon, Oct 7, 2019, at 12:14 PM, Adam Thornton wrote:
And just in case you didn't know about it....
https://github.com/yjwen/org-reveal
This converts org-mode docs to reveal.js presentations.
https://athornton.github.io/Jupyter-PCW-2019/ is an example
I was not familiar with this, thanks for pointing it out!
In the past, for presentations I have used org-beamer to produce LaTeX Beamer
presentations, which works very well, but of course there are no fancy transitions or
anything. I'll definitely check out reveal.js, I didn't know that was a thing.
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
Poulsbo, WA
web(a)loomcom.com
4 Oct
4 Oct
7:25 p.m.
On 10/4/19 6:20 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
So my kid is using LaTex and I'd like to show him
what troff can do.
For the record, back when he was born, 20 years ago, I was program
chair for Linux Expo (which sounds like a big deal but all it meant
was I had the job of formatting the proceedings). LaTex was a big
deal but I pushed people towards troff and the few people that took
the push came back and said "holy crap is this easy".
My kid is a math guy, does anyone have some eqn input and output
that they can share?
I've got no such thing that I still have available to myself,
but perhaps "A System for Typesetting Mathematics" in the 7th Edition
manual volume 2A would be something of relevance?
It's both an introduction to eqn(1) and shows off what it can do.
https://tex.loria.fr/divers/unix-eqn1.ps.gz
http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/v7man/eqn/eqn2e.ps
^ seemingly updated version, found dvia Schaffter's mom macro documentation
1661
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15 comments
14 participants
participants (14)
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Adam Thornton -
aksr -
arnold＠skeeve.com -
Dave Horsfall -
Fabio Scotoni -
George Michaelson -
Jon Forrest -
Kurt H Maier -
Larry McVoy -
Nemo -
Seth J. Morabito -
Seth Morabito
-
Steffen Nurpmeso -
U'll Be King of the Stars