Re: [9fans] Programming tutorial draft

[Pietro Gagliardi]

On Nov 7, 2008, at 11:09 AM, Dan Cross wrote:

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 3:03 AM, Bruce Ellis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

I'd like to see a you tube video of the troff.

Dude, don't tempt me.  When (if?) I (ever?) get off of active duty, I
might do a youtube video on troff.  I know that's not quite what you
were saying, but it'd be hilarious.

       - Dan C.

(ps- Bruce, let me know when you'll be stateside again.)

How is this to start:



        Let's start by creating a simple document. Create a new text file:

                > first_troff

and edit it:

                acme first_troff

Now let's type a few words:

                hello, world

Save your work. In my case, I middle-click the Put at the top.
        Now comes the fun part. In Plan 9, to preview the document, you say

                troff first_troff | proof

or

                troff first_troff | page



                troff first_troff | grops > first_troff.ps

(Heirloom goes here.)"

If I made it, it wouldn't be on youtube (I don't want to give up my rights to the video). But I would definitely give it to you, the groff guys, and the Heirloom guys. "This video will teach you troff. What is troff? troff is a document preparation system, much like TeX or Microsoft Word. troff is one of the first of these systems to support fonts in italic and drawing on the page. It was developed by the late Joe Ossanna and is the latest and newest in a long line of document programs. troff is most like TeX in that the document is a text file containing words with formatting commands mixed in. This means you'll have to get used to the command line. Three primary versions of troff are used today. The official version, based of Ossanna's work, is in the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system. The most common one is groff, a version made for the GNU project. There is also Heirloom troff, based off the ones by OpenSolaris. All three are free software. So as you can see, troff is a Unix tool. But if you are on Windows, don't despair: there are ports of these tools to Windows. I will be running Plan 9 for my demo. I will use page. With GNU, you convert to a PostScript file and open it with an image viewer:

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