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

[Greg A. Woods via TUHS]

At Sat, 23 May 2026 11:44:13 -0400, Douglas McIlroy via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
Subject: [TUHS] Re: troff.org and the old bell-labs.com domain
>
> Roughly speaking, Tex cleaned up the architecture but botched the
> aesthetics.

I don't find TeX as one uses it to be "clean" in any aesthetic way,
though I agree its underlying architecture is a thing of beauty.

A mentor of mine strongly preferred PlainTeX (Knuth's own macro package)
over LaTeX, and I found it was indeed quite a bit easier to work with.

Meanwhile though I mostly continued using troff for quite some time,
including publishing a newsletter with 2-column format (using mm).

However at some point in the early 1990's I switched to Lout, which I
think in some ways is the best of both worlds thrown together and then
cleaned up and simplified as much as possible.

	http://jeffreykingston.id.au/lout/

It is reasonably fast and has many/most(?) of the capabilities of troff,
including tables, equations, and pic-like diagram drawing, and of course
works well on Unix and Unix-like systems.  It generates PostScript or
PDF output.

--
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods at acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods at avoncote.ca>
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