[COFF] roff vs. Tex (was: Looking for final C compiler by Dennis Ritchie)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Monday, 23 July 2018 at 12:41:46 -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 11:56 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>> I agree that roff is awesome, it's a bummer that Latex seems to be
>> the winner (which I think is purely because the roff/eqn/pic/etc
>> docs weren't widely available back in the day).
>
> I have to disagree with this, however. TeX (and more specifically
> LaTeX) won out for technical writing because, frankly, it produces
> nicer output than *roff did. If I were writing a thesis or paper,
> I'd frankly rather use LaTeX or AMSLaTeX.

What about a book?  Back in the late 1980s/early 1990s I used TeX and
LaTeX, but when I started writing "Porting UNIX Software" (O'Reilly),
they insisted on me using (g)roff with their proprietary macros.  I
resisted, of course, but it was clear that I didn't have much choice.
And then I discovered that it was *so* much easier to use, and I've
never used TeX again, though I made significant modifications to the
macro set, to the point that it was no more O'Reilly than ms.

My big issue was that it produces nicer output than TeX.  In those
days at any rate you could tell TeX output a mile off because of the
excessive margins and the Computer Modern fonts.  Neither is required,
of course, but it seems that it must have been so much more difficult
to change than it was with [gt]roff (or that the authors just didn't
care).

Still, TeX has one significant advantage over [gt]roff that I'm aware
of: it adjusts paragraphs, not lines, and it seems that in some cases
this give better looking layout.

This reflects the situation in about 1993 or 1994.  Maybe TeX has
become more usable since then.  Certainly LaTeX refuses to look at my
old LaTeX source.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 163 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/coff/attachments/20180724/1233fd4b/attachment.sig>