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

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 10:22:58AM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> On Tuesday, 11 January 2022 at  6:00:05 -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > 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've never used real troff, just groff.  But from the man pages I
> understood that real troff only generated output for specific
> typesetters, while groff generated PostScript.  Not so?

Yeah, it's been hashed out in this thread.  I think originally it was
for a C/A/T thingy, then somebody did a DVI which a virtual thingy
with "drivers" for each target thingy, and then there was a pay
version for postscript and then groff.

Or something like that, if you read through this thread it's been
hashed out pretty hard.  And over on the groff mailing list they
are putting the history in a man page going all the way back to
RUNOFF.

Loving the interest in roff, it's my favorite for writing papers
or docs.  Have developed a bit of a taste for asciidoc for simple
stuff for the web.

--lm