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

[Blake McBride via TUHS]

On Fri, May 22, 2026 at 8:52 PM Larry McVoy via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> 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.
>
> 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.
>

I have a long and deep love of troff.  Years ago I created a set of macros
that produced HP PCL for HP printers.  With it, a team produced thousands
of mortgage forms for years.

Troff just made sense to me, and I've always loved it.

When TeX came out I was eager to try it.  Two things I discovered:

1. When troff produced a document, I could tell it was produced by troff.
It looked uniquely troff to me.  I'm not sure why.  When I produced a
document with TeX/LaTeX it looked just like a modern book.  It was a thing
of beauty and perfection.

2. While I found troff straightforward to understand, after close to 30
years with TeX/LaTeX and reading every book I could get my hands on, I
still have little understanding of it.  I could spend hours trying to do
the simplest thing.  I am clearly not smart enough for TeX/LaTeX.  I have
now published a few books.  All were written with LyX - a GUI front-end for
LaTeX.  My books come out looking like all other books you'd buy at any
bookstore.

I use troff when I can.  I use LyX whenever I am writing something for
publication.

Blake McBride
blakemcbride.us