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

[Dan Cross via TUHS]

On Sat, May 23, 2026 at 10:22 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

Maybe.  I kind of prefer the `eqn` version, to be honest, but `eqn`
was too limited compared to the full generality of TeX. If you need to
typeset serious mathematics, the latter is just better. Sorry; that's
just how it is.

> 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

Here, I kind of prefer the TeX version.

> 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".

I think the notion of "winning" here is a misnomer.  TeX and LaTeX are
good for some things; troff is good for some things. Personally, I am
rather fond of the aesthetics of troff output, but LaTeX is superior
for typesetting mathematics.

Doug brings up some great points, giving voice to some of my own
latent frustrations with TeX: the output verbosity, the
poorly-understood interactive mode, and I find the error messages to
be poor.

One wonders whether how the design of TeX would have been different
if, say, Knuth had had more exposure to Unix when he was building it.

        - Dan C.