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From: ken@rochester.ARPA (SKY)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Why troff?
Message-ID: <24125@rochester.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 23-Jan-87 15:58:40 EST
Article-I.D.: rocheste.24125
Posted: Fri Jan 23 15:58:40 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Jan-87 05:37:40 EST
References: <362@linus.UUCP> <588@eneevax.UUCP>
Reply-To: ken@rochester.UUCP (SKY)
Distribution: comp.text
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 25
Keywords: TeX, troff

|nroff/troff has served the mainframe publishing world well, especially at
|such installations as large daily newspapers where you find little technical
|text and need for output better than any laser printer can offer today.

|I admit my experience with both is probably just as limited, but I do
|know phototypesetting, and the formatting commands in troff are 
|more agreeable with people in strict typesetting situations who either
|have no need for the technical typesetting features of TeX or don't care
|for WYSIWYG anyway because of the sheer amount of text they are dealing with.

Gee, aren't these also the people with typesetters fed by paper tape? :-)

I suspect the needs of newspapers are different from jornals (wider
variety of material). But it may interest you that a couple of people
from TV Guide attended the last TUG meeting.

Both troff and TeX are capable of driving high resolution typesetters.
Several ACM journals are willing to take TeX input. Also DECUS proceedings.

TeX or LaTeX may not seem to have as many knobs as troff, but they are
there, just well hidden from casual users. Personally I'm tired of
fiddling with indents and similar minutiae and would rather concentrate
on content.

	Ken