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From: ken@rochester.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Why Troff ?
Message-ID: <24367@rochester.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 1-Feb-87 01:02:07 EST
Article-I.D.: rocheste.24367
Posted: Sun Feb  1 01:02:07 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 1-Feb-87 16:24:17 EST
References: <3016@osu-eddie.UUCP>
Reply-To: ken@rochester.UUCP (SKY)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 30

|Who is going to rewrite my thousands of Shell scripts and papers
|written in past 5 years? Those Shell scripts are a mix of 
|troff, ex, sed, awk, ....etc. I don't even know can TeX support such an
|environment or not.  What I mean support is the capability of mixing 
|with other UNIX tools to have a NEW tool quickly by a noraml user.

First off, rewriting papers is a losing proposition from the start.
Leave old papers alone.

There is no reason tools like WWB can't be made to work for TeX.  Detex
is the analog of deroff. Surely you must be exaggerating to say you
have thousands of shell scripts.

|Could we list out the criteria to evaluate a typesetting tool 
|from the users' point of view ( NOT SYSTEM PEOPLE's !) first.
|Then, give adequate weight to each item we listed for different
|types of users. THEN, evaluate these  tools against these
|criteria.

I am afraid you are going to have to drag in WYSIWYG editors and all
that too. I don't believe in ideology, just what works best for me.  If
I had a printer accepting the \special command I wouldn't be too proud
to use tpic (a TeX version of pic).  Drawing pictures in LaTeX is
tedious.  I would even use physical cut and paste if neccessary.

One thing I do like about TeX is there is a community of expert
users (present company excluded) willing to share solutions and
software.  Troff experts are an endangered species.

	Ken