Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!codas!peora!pesnta!phri!roy From: roy@phri.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Re: Why troff? Message-ID: <2577@phri.UUCP> Date: Sun, 25-Jan-87 14:24:09 EST Article-I.D.: phri.2577 Posted: Sun Jan 25 14:24:09 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 27-Jan-87 03:22:30 EST References: <362@linus.UUCP> <765@nrcvax.UUCP> Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) Distribution: comp.text Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY) Lines: 49 Keywords: TeX, troff In article <765@nrcvax.UUCP> terry@nrcvax.UUCP (Terry Grevstad) writes: > I love troff. You, sir, are a sick person! :-) > I don't know about inertia. If you are perfectly satisfied with what > you have where is the impetus to change? As I said in a previous article, I use troff in preference to TeX. This is not to say that I like troff better than TeX (although "troff" is easier to type). In fact, I hate troff. More than that, I hate "bib | tbl | eqn | troff", which I do every day. It must be even worse if you have to do "bib | pic | ideal | grap | tbl | eqn | JRandomPreprocessor | troff". Why do I hate troff and friends so much (I suppose you could say "any friend of troff's is no friend of mine")? Not because it's slow, or because the output isn't as nice as what TeX produces, but simply because to get anything fancy done, you have to deal with 4 separate programs (and 2 sets of macros (bib and troff)), all of which interract with each other in strange ways. Have you ever seen what happens when you leave a $ out of an equation inside a table? Even worse, try leaving an unmatched \fI in a bib data base. And don't tell me to use checkeq and checknr to find the errors; I can show you lots of things that pass unscathed through those and yet cause troff to have a fit. When I was on my way out the door Friday afternoon, somebody came to me with a tbl problem -- he has a table which works fine when he runs if off by itself, but when he prints it along with the rest of his manuscript, he gets pages of ".if 683 < 683" lines printed out. I've seen that happen before, and I've fixed it numerous times, but I still don't know what causes it. The worst part is that it'll still be there when I get into the office tommorow morning; one more reason to hate Mondays. Don't get me wrong. I think troff is a wonderful piece of software. It's 15 years old and still going strong. It's been bent and twisted and stretched into doing things it was never really designed to do and it somehow manages to keep going. It's just that more is being demanded of it than it has to give and it's time to move on to something else. Unfortunately, I havn't yet found that something else. I think TeX is it, but I'm not yet sure. As much as I hate troff, I have so much invested in it (and so do the people I work with) that whatever replaces it has to be a lot better than troff to justify the cost of learning something new. -- Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 "you can't spell deoxyribonucleic without unix!"