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

[Bakul Shah]

Don Knuth talks at length about how TeX & MetaFont came about etc. in his Web of Stories interview in parts 50 through 70. In Part 56 he does say he looked at "the system developed at Bell Labs", presumably troff. In part 68 he talks about the importance of stability fot TeX and later talks about LaTeX and ConTeXt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzqhuWBClcM&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzeNLngr1JqyQki3wdoGrCn&index=56

I must say I am a fan of TeX/LaTeX and not a fan of nroff/troff -- I don't like the troff look and I don't like the markup. The nice thing is we can choose whatever typesetting tools we want! I played with other alternatives such as lout and Sile but didn't like them all that much. I immediately liked the TeX's model of boxes and glue. I like the fact that I can typeset Indic language text beautifully. But like any complex tool, you have to take time to learn it and practice to get proficient at it.

At the same time I am not a fan of the way Knuth does literate programming. What I'd like is a two view editor where I can jump from code to related documentation and vice versa. And when you're working on one, the related part in the other view highlighted. In this world I don't want to deal with files and directories -- just one virtual document, however it is stored put under version control!

> On Jan 11, 2022, at 5:19 PM, Mary Ann Horton <mah at mhorton.net> wrote:
> 
> I recall attending a TeX lecture by Knuth around 1981. He said he wasn't satisfied with the character layout from other formatting programs, which drove him to write TeX. He illustrated in great detail the kerning and exact placement of the font characters next to each other. I couldn't tell the difference, but clearly it was very important to him. He wanted his documents to look perfect.
> 
> On 1/10/22 12:33 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 01:00:15PM -0600, Blake McBride wrote:
>>> 2.  Looking at the output, it is my opinion that TeX produces
>>> better-looking documents.
>> It's a double edged sword.  TeX looks better but you instantly know it is
>> TeX, it has a particular look.  Troff looks just fine to me, and you don't
>> know it is Troff, Word, or what.