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

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 01:50:40AM -0700, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> > Tim O'Reilly got it, wrote a book about it but I think it was
> > too little too late.
> 
> That book was open sourced ~ 2 decades ago. It was scanned, OCR'ed
> and converted back into troff. See https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/utp/
> and in particular https://github.com/larrykollar/Unix-Text-Processing .

Yeah but it is 2022.  2 decades ago is 2002.  TeX was first released
in 1978.  So it had 2+ decades where it was out there, the docs were
out there, and Unix was doing the licensing dance.  It may be ancient
history but troff was not a given on every platform.  nroff was there
but troff was considered optional, you had to pay for it and a lot of
vendors didn't see the value.  So the docs and you weren't sure if you
would have it at your next job, not good.

I really wish it were different, I adore troff, I wrote something
called webroff that took -ms input and produced our website (until
we got marketing people and they replaced it with something "better",
better my ass).  I've written papers in TeX and while it isn't horrible,
it's not great, I see nothing there that makes me want it over roff.