Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!yetti!geac!len
From: len@geac.UUCP (Leonard Vanek)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Why troff?
Message-ID: <508@geac.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 30-Jan-87 10:15:57 EST
Article-I.D.: geac.508
Posted: Fri Jan 30 10:15:57 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Jan-87 10:29:59 EST
References: <362@linus.UUCP> <106@tg.UUCP> <2986@osu-eddie.UUCP>
Reply-To: len@geac.UUCP (Leonard Vanek)
Distribution: comp.text
Organization: Geac Computers Intl. Toronto, CANADA
Lines: 47

While I acknowledge the fact that TeX makes it easy to prepare
very attractive typeset-quality documents and that it is
probably easier to use for this purpose than is troff, my
experience as a new user of TeX but a relatively experienced
nroff user is that the price that is paid for this is that some
of the EASY things are much harder, if not impossible, to do.

Since I am new to TeX (atually LaTeX) it is possible that that
problems I have encountered are easily solved. In this case,
please treat this diatribe as an appeal for help. Otherwise, it
can be taken as my negative comment about TeX and LaTeX.

1.  Conditional "newpage" for lists seems to be impossible to
    achieve without having to hard-code the line length into a
    "parbox" command. What happens if I change document styles
    and the line length changes accordingly?
    
    Naked n/troff have their ".ne" command, which would have been
    all I needed in this case. The n/troff macro sets have their
    "keeps", which bracket the text which they are intended to
    keep on one page.
    
    All I want to do is print a list consisting of a section
    heading and three items without having the heading and one
    item at the bottom of one page and the last two items at the
    top of the next page.

2. "Verbatim" environments force output into a rather ugly
    typewriter font, which cannot be overridden. Besides the fact
    that this font is rather ugly, the presence of this font
    causes our printer's font buffer to overflow (or something of
    the sort) and the fonts for printing section and/or
    subsection headings fail to load.
    
    This problem should probably be blamed on the LN03 printer
    driver, not TeX, but maybe TeX should be aware of such
    limitations and at least give a warning. It took several days
    to figure out what was going on, and in the meantime we
    wasted reams of paper on test runs as we adjusted the
    position of the "end{document}" command.
    
Thanks for letting me blow off some steam. If there are solutions
to my problems I would love to know about them.

Len

..utzoo!yetti!geac!len