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

[Ron Natalie via TUHS]

I was never overly fond of the typography that Tex generated.   I could 
always spot a document produced by it.
Troff’s rooting in proper typesetting meant that it generated more 
conventional appearing text.

The only dead giveaway was the little pumps that the pic driver for some 
of the printers did on the boxes outlining the table output.
There was a couple of pixel overshoot on the vertical lines that gave a 
telltale bump at the top corners.



------ Original Message ------
>From "Larry McVoy via TUHS" <tuhs at tuhs.org>
To tuhs at tuhs.org
Date 5/22/2026 9:42:51 PM
Subject [TUHS] Re: troff.org and the old bell-labs.com domain

>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.
>
>All that said, my nerd son has gone all in on LaTex and he makes stuff
>look good.  I think LaTex won, I'm not happy about it but it is what it
>is.
>
>I fully support anything that makes troff better.
>
>Back when my first son was born, 2019, I was program committee chair for
>Linux Expo, which was not a big deal, it meant that I formatted all the
>papers into a book.  I tried to get people to do troff, only a few did,
>but they said "holy shit, it's so fast".  I think LaTex does multiple
>passes so they can do a table of contents, troff was faster.
>
>But even though I had some sucess at pushing people to troff, it was
>not the winner.  I wish it was.
>
>On Sat, May 23, 2026 at 12:07:39AM +0100, Ralph Corderoy via TUHS wrote:
>>  Hi Lyndon,
>>
>>  > Does anyone know if Ralph is still maintaining that page?
>>
>>  Yes, I'm not dead yet.  I'll reply more off-list.
>>
>>  --
>>  Cheers, Ralph.
>
>--
>---
>Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat