[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 11:18:48AM -0700, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> arnold at skeeve.com writes:
> > Nemo Nusquam <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On 05/14/18 11:21, Jon Steinhart wrote (in part):
> > > > Also, as part of the book project, I have a script that I've written that
> > > > converts the original troff source into OpenOffice XHTML since my publisher
> > > > won't do troff.
> > >
> > > I am curious about PHI.  Tannenbaum praises troff in his prefaces (and 
> > > says that all his books are written in troff).  Not much on the PHI website.
> > >
> > > N.
> >
> > This is getting off-topic.  Prentice Hall (Pearson) generally works with
> > Word but they are able to make allowance for other formats. For sure TeX,
> > and they can work with troff if the author wants to provide the "camera
> > ready copy" themselves (see, for example, Brian's book on Go, done with
> > groff).
> >
> > I wrote my PH book in Texinfo and the converted it to DocBook XML; they
> > used a contractor to actually go from there to typesettable copy.
> >
> > Arnold
> 
> Well, this issue, at least in my case, isn't troff per-se.  It's that editors
> and such want to be able to read test, make comments in the margins, and track
> changes.  I would claim that troff, tex, et. al. are great tools for people
> who write stuff and shepherd it to publication which is great for specs and
> technical papers and all that.  What's lacking is tools for the involvement
> of third-parties such as editors.

I've successfully used troff to write our commercial contract.
I collaborated with a guy at Fenwick&West, taught him enough troff -ms
that he could make changes.  We sourced 6 different contracts from one doc
and the lawyer *loved* that, he really wanted that fuctionality in Word.