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

arnold at skeeve.com arnold at skeeve.com
Tue Jan 11 18:57:09 AEST 2022


"Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

>  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.

The DocBook conversion make it easy for them to generate HTML so
that books could be put on CD and browsed with a web browser.
I believe that was the main motivation.

I wrote the second edition of "sed & awk" in troff and then they
"converted" it to DocBook (with said backend that went back to
troff for producing print).  The conversion to DocBook was a disaster,
such that I threatened to cancel doing the book.

A lot of manual work later, the book came out OK, but boy was it painful.

That backend was still in use ~ 2004 when I did "Unix In A Nutshell"
and "Classic Shell Scripting" but they have moved on since then.

Arnold

P.S. Eric Raymond's love of DocBook not withstanding, it's a miserable
markup language to have to work in.


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