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

[Bakul Shah via TUHS]

On May 23, 2026, at 7:49 AM, Warner Losh via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> 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.

Great!

> 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.

IMHO it is more than that.
- public domain from the get go but tight quality control
- behaves the same way on any machine/arch 
- device independent from the get go
- more flexible
- thoroughly documented
- superior at typesetting mathematics
- a simple base model (boxes and glue)
- better at typesetting non-western languages
- latex was simple enough for articles, tech reports and such
- high extensible (which is why there are so many packages)
- the output is far less opinionated than troff (troff documents
  have a particular "look" -- may be I haven't seen enough samples).
- a responsive author who paid up for every reported bug!
etc.

Larry mentioned you can write a whole article in one line using LaTeX
but nobody does that - just as nobody really writes a C program in one
line (except for IOCCC)!

Étienne Ghys puts Knuth in the company of Gutenburg, Pacioli, Da Vinci.
Only time will tell but we can be sure that a Tex/LaTeX document created
today will still produce the same output 100 years from now.

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beautiful-typography-done-in-tex-friends

https://tug.org/texshowcase/

Ghys - The Shape of Letters: From Leonardo Da Vinci to Donald Knuth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OIxzewWilc