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

[Perry E. Metzger]

On Tue, 24 Jul 2018 13:52:06 +1000 Greg 'groggy' Lehey
<grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> 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:
> 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).

It's a single command most of the time to change font.

   \usepackage{palatino}

for example. (That's at the start of many of my documents.)

It's also a single command to change your margins. Similar complexity,
a dozen chars and you're done.

I don't love TeX's command language, it's gross, but it's not hard to
do simple things like that, and the typesetting results are kind of
remarkable if you know what you're doing. The most beautiful books in
the world (by a lot) are typeset in modern TeX. I don't even think you
can do microtypography in any troff that I've seen, and forget things
like having both lining and text figures in the same
document.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com