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

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Wednesday, 25 July 2018 at 17:24:40 -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 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.)

That's the case now, I assume.  I've just dragged out the TeXbook
(February 1989), LaTeX user's guide and reference (referring to LaTeX
2.06 (April 1986)) and "TeX for the Impatient" (1990).  None of them
mention this command, and after 20 minutes of searching I wasn't able
to find any reference in any of them to any font family except CM, and
thus also no way to change to one.  About the only titbit I found was
that you needed separate commands for each font at each size, and that
this was impractical.  A far cry from troff's .ps command.

> 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.

It's possible, and I've done it (even simulating the “TeX" symbol).
But then, I've written my own macros, and I found it easier than
messing with TeX.

Still, this isn't a TeX-bashing session.  I was just explaining why I
changed.

Greg
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