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

[Douglas McIlroy via TUHS]

The text-block architecture  of Tex (not Latex, which is just a macro
package with a nice manual) beats the line-oriented architecture of troff
by supporting recursion. You can embed math in pictures in tables to any
depth in any combination in Tex, but not in troff.

In math, Tex's representations of sub and sup are a definite improvement,
as is its representation of matrices--directly rather than transposed. Eqn
is otherwise much cleaner and easier to read than Tex's backslash-strewn
style, not least because eqn matches the spoken language of math. Who would
utter, "frac of a b" in preference to  "a over b"?

And pic is beyond compare (though afflicted with the nesting issue I
mentioned at the outset).

Finally, Tex's "interactive" interface and execution-time chatter are awful.

Roughly speaking, Tex cleaned up the architecture but botched the
aesthetics.

Doug

On Sat, May 23, 2026 at 10:33 AM Larry McVoy via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> On Sat, May 23, 2026 at 10:12:25AM -0400, Theodore Tso 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
>
> Maybe it's my history but I find the troff version much easier to read.
> I like pic(1) and it reads a lot like that.
>
> Part of the beauty of pic is that it was invented when getting a print out
> was likely an over night thing.  And there were no bit mapped displays so
> you had to be able to look at the code and imagine it in your brain.  If
> you couldn't you were in for a long slow slog before you got things right.
>
> > 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
>
> Again, I like the troff one better.  It's probably because I'm a source
> management person and the troff thing of starting a macro on a new line
> means you break up the text.  LaTex lets you make the whole document in
> one line if you like, and that is a nightmare for version control.
>
> > I don't think it's say that LaTeX one out over troff just because of
> > "marketing".
>
> I shouldn't have said marketing, that's not quite it.  For a long time,
> the troff documentation was locked up.  I had it in paper form because
> UW-Madison made me buy it.  But I couldn't make a copy and hand it to
> someone because $LICENSES.  I think that gave an opening to LaTex and
> LaTex took it.
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
>