[TUHS] It is time to modernise "groff"

Doug McIlroy doug at cs.dartmouth.edu
Tue Sep 5 21:37:16 AEST 2017


> > p) Remove the '-a' option (the ASCII approximation output).
> 
> I didn't even know this existed.  Looking at what it spits out, I find
> myself wondering what good it is.  Is this for Unix troff compatibility?
> For people who didn't even have glass TTYs and needed to imagine what
> the typeset output would look like?

Here's a classic use:

Since groff is not WYSIWYG, the experimental cycle is long:
edit - save - groff - view. In many cases that cycle can be
short-circuited by typing straight into groff -a.

doug



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