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

[Theodore Tso via TUHS]

On Sat, May 23, 2026 at 10:02:39PM -0500, Blake McBride via TUHS wrote:
> 
> 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'd suggest the two is related.  If you just use standard LaTeX
without any customizations, it's quite easy to understand:

\documentclass{article}
\title{A sample LaTeX document}
\author{Theodore Tso}
\date{May 2026}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
\section{Introduction}

This is a sample document.  

\section{Easy peasy lemon squeezy}

Isn't it simple to understand?

\end{document}

.... but the resulting document will *obviously* look like LaTeX.
There is definitely a default LaTeX look, just as there is a default
troff look.  The reason why you can make it look "like a modern book"
is because it's possible to customize the bejeesus out of it.  This is
probably possible in troff as well, but I've never been smart enough
to figure out how to do the kind of extreme customizations that I've
done by breaking out of LaTeX and using raw TeX macros.  But at that
point, it can very easily become Forth-like in terms of being a
write-only document.  :-)

	      	       	       - Ted