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

[Warner Losh via TUHS]

On Sat, May 23, 2026, 8:13 AM Theodore Tso via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> 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".
>

Two letter macros was the main reason I jumped to TeX... it was impossible
to do commplex thongs that you could pick back up later. TeX is a n eldrige
horror to write macros for (until it clicks), but the resulting docs are
easier to come back to later (at least for LaTeX). And essier to share. Raw
TeX isn't why LaTeX won. It was the ease you can pull in dozens of packages
to tweak everything in document. Troff can't do that without importing .eps
files created outside the tool, making Makefiles a lot more complex. I'm
working on the next edition of The Design and Implementation of FreeBSD and
we are converting from troff to LaTex and the crazy hoops you have to jump
through are somewhat easier in LaTeX... but not without it's own headaches.

So I'd frame TeX as winning for much the same reason as python, pearl or
rust winning: they all have add-in packages that are easy to mix and match
in a relatively seamless way. Troff has never had more than a few nacro
packages and aux tools for its pipeline. And many of those were mix and
match from here and there rather than cpan mumble.

Warner

                                                - Ted
>