[TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 06:13:43PM -0800, Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) wrote:
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey writes:
> 
> > As long as man pages are formatted with ?roff, I don't see it going
> > away.  I don't suppose many people use troff any more, but there are
> > enough of us, and as long as man pages stay the way they are, I don't
> > think we're in any danger.
> 
> Well there is mandoc(1).  But as time goes by they just seem to be
> re-implementing nroff.  Of course that *must* be easier than just
> learning n/troff in the first place :-P
> 
> I really don't understand this need to throw troff overboard.  

It's docs.  The *roff docs were locked up with the Unix license.
Those docs were awesome, terse but full of info like the C book.
Unlike the C book they were not readily available.  My Uni had a
Unix license so I still have the stack of docs, decades later,
still useful.  

I firmly believe if those docs had been open source, freely 
available, whatever, we would all be using an evolved roff.

I tried to get Microsoft, weakly, to make Word spit out roff.
Never went anywhere and I think they would have screwed it 
up, there was a UI, Gremlin maybe?  Don't remember, but it 
spit out pic.  Horrible pic.

The world would be a better place if Word spit out readable 
and modifiable roff.  Imagine being in Word and going, yeah,
I know what it is trying to do, let me drop down to -ms and
do it.  And Word took your changes.

Tim O'Reilly got it, wrote a book about it but I think it was
too little too late.

Roff is not going to take over the world but Greg is right,
man pages will keep it here.  Some of us will help.