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

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Monday, 10 January 2022 at 18:42:18 -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 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.

Are these the PSD docs that are included with FreeBSD, or something
else?

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

For a time perspective, this was 1987, before O'Reilly and Associates
was founded.  But the macros they (also, primarily, Dale Dougherty)
described there are the basis for the macros they used at ORA when I
started writing for them in 1993.  Some time round the turn of the
millennium they then migrated to DocBook, at least for the author
interface.  I think that they had some magic to then convert it to
groff.  So I don't think it was "too late"; the DocBook conversion
suggests that the authors didn't like groff, though I thought that the
conversion was a retrograde step.

Greg
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