Re: If it is still unclear to someone...

On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 02:34:26PM +0000, Tuomo Valkonen wrote:
> On 2007-03-20, Joerg van den Hoff <[email protected]> wrote:
> > a) `groff' is not ancient at all and still actively maintained (`groff' is
> > actually more recent than TeX). 
> 
> The command set and syntax are from the 1950s or something, when you 
make that the 1970ies, a bit newer than C than...
> had  to to write it all on a punchcard. You can't make heads or tails of
and make that a pdp11, I think
> it just by looking at the file; you have to look at the documentation.
what file? the markupped text? I don't think that `ms' markup is harder (or 
easier) to understand than latex markup. for the macro definitions themselves:
yeah, that's sort of crazy (but probably the low level TeX stuff does not look
better). looking at the documentation as a prerequisite of generating a
sensible document: would you say that is different from latex???

> That doesn't lend to random contributors improving the documentation.
tell me: where is the difference between `-ms' and `-man' markup in terms
of your points (random contributors don't understand it, 'old', etc)?
> LaTeX, on the other hand, has commands that are understandable when
> you look at the document, even if you didn't know how to write a LaTeX
> document from scratch. Too bad LaTeX documents are hardly understandable
> by other programs, them being programs themselves.
same thing with groff (being a program), of course.
so: you know how to use latex, I know how to use groff. that seems the basic
difference.
concerning "understanding" the latex source: I will give you that latex markup
is much more verbose (which I don't like: I have to type it or make lots of 
vi shortcuts or what else) and therefore one could easier guess that

\begin{paragraph}

is just that, than that

.LP

(for left adjusted paragraph) does just the same in `groff -ms'. but the 10 odd
pages I sent around concering use of `ms' seem to compare rather favourably to
the length of the average latex guide...

> 
> > I think it would'nt harm if one
> > would not loose this option without better reasons than that the tutorial
> > would simply not pop up via `man tutorial'.
> 
> I still think that using such arcane formats as *roff is pointless, 
> unless you're writing a man page.
> 
I still think you are wrong but will leave it at that. but hey, guys, why not,
at least put this in a file `tutorial.txt`:

.\"----------------------------------------------------------------------------
.TL
ion3 tutorial
.AU
some_guy
.AI
some_institution
.NH
Introduction
.LP
is going  here
.NH
keybindings
.LP
can be found here in a nice table:
.\"-------------------------------
.TS
box center tab(;);
l l.
key;action
_
F1;access manpages
F2;xterm
.TE
.\"-------------------------------
.NH
customizing your statusbar
.LP
can be tough.
.NH 2
statusbar: the basic layout
.LP
is here
.NH 2
statusbar: extensions
.LP
are here
.\"----------------------------------------------------------------------------
things to memorize to 'read' the above: 

`.\"' -- is the admittedly strange start_of_comment .
`.TL' -- title
`.AU' -- author
`.AI' -- author's institution
`.NH' -- starts new numbered section header (trailing number is section level) 
`.LP' -- starts new leftjustified paragraph, 
`.TS/.TE' --  brackets tables ('table start', 'table end') 

now issue :

1. `groff -t -ms tutorial.txt > tutorial.ps; gv tutorial.ps'
2. `groff -t -ms -TX100 tutorial.txt'
3. `nroff -t -ms tutorial.txt'

and look (and compare with what you need to achieve approx. the same with `-man' or
`latex' (where latex is not an option if one wants to maintain formatting into
the terminal)).

my vote:
best solution: use `ms'
second best solution: use `man'

joerg