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

[Adam Thornton via TUHS]

Seems like a lot of the cool kids are using typst these days.

https://github.com/typst/typst or https://typst.app

Adam

On Sun, May 24, 2026 at 5:36 PM Greg A. Woods via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
wrote:

> 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>
>
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>