[TUHS] earliest Unix roff

[Ronald Natalie]

> On Sep 16, 2019, at 11:14 AM, Richard Salz <rich.salz at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Is it any surprise that the early GNU effort was really trying to recreate ITS?  Can you really blame them?  I'm grateful that they made `info` be a standalone program.  Putting the concept of "cursor position" into the existing pagers (more/less/etc) and doing jump/xref/back would be more than a stretch, IMO.
> 

Having been an early UNIX Emacs adoptee (I never really learned VI, if there was no emacs, I just used ed.    A tendency that my employees always found amusing), I could never tolerate INFO in any of its forms (either ITS or on UNIX).
It was far too cumbersome for the features it claimed to add to the mix.

As for formatters, my biggest gripe with many of them is that I should not be able to tell what the formatter is by looking at the output.   This is where Tex fails.    It’s ugly style always seems to telegraph through.   The only thing that is worse is those odd little bumps on the top of pic-framed tbl output.