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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Why troff?
Message-ID: <7593@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 30-Jan-87 21:12:29 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.7593
Posted: Fri Jan 30 21:12:29 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 30-Jan-87 21:12:29 EST
References: <362@linus.UUCP> <106@tg.UUCP>, <1556@trwrb.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 45
Keywords: TeX, troff

> 	I don't know if troff itself has any bugs, but the preprocessors
> eqn and tbl surely do.  TeX is (probably) bug free. ...

What about the macro packages, e.g. LaTeX, which are TeX's equivalent of
some of the preprocessors?

> -- Pic
> 	Troff can draw pictures.  TeX can't.

There are now some picture-drawing capabilities for TeX, notably in LaTeX.
It still doesn't match the combination of pic, ideal, grap, and chem.
Troff's strength is in its preprocessors; the program itself is pretty poor.

> -- Can create your own fonts
> 	You can do this in troff too but not nearly as easily.  TeX's 
> companion program METAFONT is very powerful and difficult to use.

There's no fundamental reason why you can't use Metafont with troff; it's
pretty independent of TeX.  The ease of creating fonts for troff depends
on the output device and its support software; in some cases it's not bad.
Note that creating *good* fonts is in general a job for an expert, not a
novice.  (Being a hot programmer does not make you a hot font designer, as
witness Knuth's fonts.)

> -- Highly portable
> 	TeX is written in WEB (Pascal) and runs on virtually everything.
> Troff runs on UNIX.

Which is highly portable and runs on virtually everything.  Admittedly,
there is a problem if the environment is constrained to a non-Unix system
for other reasons -- few sites are willing to change operating systems
just to get a good text formatter.

> -- Help facility
> 	TeX is interactive.  It will stop and give you short online
> help when it finds an error.  Troff just continues until it is done
> and screws up your output.

The other side of this is people who can't stand TeX because it insists
on being interactive, blithering at them given the slightest excuse.
Whether one prefers this to troff's silence and relatively poor error
diagnosis is very much a matter of taste.
-- 
Legalize			Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
freedom!			{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry