Xref: utzoo comp.unix.questions:11239 comp.unix.wizards:14291
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!rutgers!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!andante!alice!debra
From: debra@alice.UUCP (Paul De Bra)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Comparing TeX and Roff
Keywords: tex,latex,nroff,troff
Message-ID: <8817@alice.UUCP>
Date: 22 Jan 89 17:48:29 GMT
References: <1269@etive.ed.ac.uk>
Reply-To: debra@alice.UUCP ()
Organization: AT&T, Bell Labs
Lines: 35

In article <1269@etive.ed.ac.uk> sam@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (S. Manoharan) writes:
}
}A few weeks ago there was an article on the net asking to compare
}both TeX and roff.
}
}I tried to learn both and observed the following:
}...
}   The disadvantage I found with TeX was there is
}   no way to get a readable output of the TeX file on an 
}   ordinary line-printer. [ Laser prints cost $$$s as well as time,
}   and hence are no joke ] A "detex" tool to strip the TeX commands is
}   available but it does not produce readable output on the
}   line-printer/terminal.
}
If you mean the real (expensive) lineprinters you are correct, but I assume
you mean ordinary cheap dot-matrix printers, for which drivers for Tex are
available. They do in general print very slowly, but produce very nice
results compared to nroff.

>PS:   Is there any tool to translate roff text to latex text
>or vice versa??  [ I have a code ( crude! ) to translate roff to
>latex but that works only for selected macros of ms package ]

I have given some explanations in an earlier posting as to why it is
impossible to translate troff to tex or latex. The existing tools handle
a small part of troff, and most of the common macro-packages and preprocessors.
But not the raw troff. Vice versa is also not available. But there exists
a dvit Tex-dvi output to ditroff-dvi output converter. So you can use the
same troff printer drivers with tex. (Don't know if that's PD).

Paul.
-- 
------------------------------------------------------
|debra@research.att.com   | uunet!research!debra     |
------------------------------------------------------