[TUHS] troff.org and the old bell-labs.com domain

[Theodore Tso via TUHS]

On Fri, May 22, 2026 at 06:42:51PM -0700, Larry McVoy via TUHS wrote:
> I think that LaTex won because of marketing.  I'm a huge troff fan, the
> BitKeeper logo was done in troff, I've done a lot of good things in troff,
> I modernized the -ms macros to look better and they did.

I'm sure a lot of it is what you're used to, but I think many people found:

\[ s = \sqrt{\frac{\sum_{i=1}^N (x_i - \bar{x})^2}{N - 1}} \]

simpler than:

.EQ
s = sqrt { { sum from i=1 to N ( x sub i - x bar ) sup 2 } over { N - 1 } }
.EN


I suspect that people also found it simpler to right macros in
TeX/LaTex compared to troff.  For example. consider:

\def\highlight#1{\bf #1}

This allows you to write something like:

This is \highlight{important}

where important will be bolded.

The rough equivalent in groff would be something like

.DE HIGHLIGHT
\fB\\$1\fR
..

And:

This is
.HIGHLIGHT important

And of course, in classical troff macro identifiers could only be two
characters, which did macro packages no favors in terms of
readability....

I don't think it's say that LaTeX one out over troff just because of
"marketing".

						- Ted