[COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 10:26:10PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> Speaking of typesetting equations, how would people compare eqn versus
> LaTeX?  I used nroff for man pages, but I never did learn how to use
> eqn for nroff.

I love the tbl|eqn|pic|grap (though that is in theory, I wrote my own)
preprocessors.  I've done a ton of tbl & pic, there are some historical
bugs that I'd like to get fixed, but for the most part they work great.
eqn I've used and made pretty math stuff but I haven't used the LaTex
version.  Somewhere I heard someone grabbed the eqn source and massaged
it for LaTex but I have no idea if that was true.

I'm especially fond of pic, you can write pic and "see" the picture
in your head if you do it right.  I'm pretty sure I know why it works
like that, I bet it was slow and expensive to get a print out so the
more you could get it to be correct in your head, the better.