On 17-Jan-02 dman wrote: > On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 07:25:32PM +0000, Ted Harding wrote: > >| I'd like to suggest giving 'groff' a try. > >| I reckon it's well up with TeX, and better in some respects. > > > Can you provide a list of the tradeoffs between [gnt]roff and (La)TeX? > > I've started with LaTeX; read lshort and now have Lamport's book. > I've barely seen some snippets of roff source. A prof. I have now > (Ken Reek) used a roff clone to typeset all of his handouts. They > look nice too. > > I'm interested in knowing the differences and tradeoffs between the > two systems, and how easy/quick is learning roff?
The comparison could be very lengthy! Both systems involve a biggish learning phase to become really proficient, though both are fairly simple (and I reckon groff is simpler) for elementary use. Both use the "markup" principle, of course, i.e. in-line tags which specify formatting requests. In my view, this is terser and less distracting in troff than in TeX, and I reckon that working with troff is quicker and simpler that with TeX. The main difference in approach to formatting between TeX and groff is that TeX "buffers" more input before deciding precisely how to format it: for instance, TeX's line-breaks and hyphenations are computed in terms of a criterion calculated for a whole paragraph, and also there is a degree of vertical justification functionality for a whole page; all this is based on the "glue" concept. On the other hand, troff's lookahead is basically only one character, and it really only buffers one word. This can lead to TeX auto-generating a more pleasing layout than troff auto-generates; though this difference is rarely evident, in my experience, and in any case it is always possible to tweak the layout by hand in troff, once the content is in its final form. In my experience, you hardly ever regret using troff rather than TeX for such reasons. TeX also comes with a much bigger default repertoire of symbols and such than troff does, but again you can install TeX fonts in groff, so this difference can be eliminated. I don't have enough experience of using TeX to give a fair comparison in terms of capabilities and ease of use, but I can certainly do what I want in groff (and I sometimes want very extreme things); and whereas it may be possible to achieve the same in TeX it is my (limited) experience that it is much harder to do something non-standard. This is (at least in part) due to the fact that in troff you are working "closer to the floor" -- rather similar to the way "Reveal Codes" in WP gives you access to the base-level formatting. Sophisticated formatting (paragraphs, footnotes, ... ) in troff depends on macros. There is a variety of macro packs available, corresponding to different styles. However, the concept of "style" in groff is less central than in TeX. It is certainly quite easy, when you know what you are doing, to modify macros to achieve minor changes. For many purposes, it is not too hard -- when you _really_ know what you are doing -- to write your own macros according to the "style" you want to achieve. One comparison srikes everyone who has used both (and it is not a criticism of the capabilities of either, though very important to users): The wide adoption of TeX, initially by the academic community and later outside, led to the production of a vast amount of documentation, including many books, on using TeX and its variants (LaTeX etc.); and much of this documentation is excellent. Troff/groff, on the other hand, is very patchily documented, and simply for this reason can be harder to learn and to use effectively. Also, TeX is TeX (and LaTeX is LaTeX etc). On the other hand, during the period (1980s-1990s) when UNIX was being split into a variety of variously incompatible versions (usually by commercial developers), this increasing diversity also took troff with it so that, again, there are various incompatible versions of "UNIX troff" out there. GNU groff has attempted to re-unify the situation (while keeping a "compatibility mode" for those who want to use it in the same way as they use "UNIX troff" -- though what the latter precisely means is debatable). I think the above are the main "strategic" comparisons. Once one gets down to detail, the list would become enormous and in any case I don't know enough about TeX to go into the detail I could go into for groff. Until a few years ago, I would have said that groff table-formatting capabilities were better than TeX's; I believe that TeX has now caught up. Highly sophisticated line-drawing capabilities have long meant that groff's diagrammatic capabilities have been excellent, and they certainly used to be better than TeX's. I can't answer for an up-to-date comparison. Groff also has an "equation editor" (quite similar to WP's which I suspect was based on troff's). Here I think TeX does a marginally better job, not only because of having more symbols etc (but see above) but also in terms of readily-achievable layout (though again the troff user can always enhance what troff can achieve). Things like tables, equations and diagrams are achieved by "preprocessor" programs which take the user's typed descriptions of what he wants, and convert these into raw troff code which is then passed to the main troff engine. TeX, as far as I know, handles such things in an integrated way. One detail is useful: the "pic" preprocessor, for diagrams, includes a powerful numerical programming capability; you can exploit this for in-line mathematical computations needed for the document. (For example, you can have an independent file of (x,y) referred to simply by name in your troff file. Then troff can reads this in at the appropriate point of fornmatting the document, and get "pic" to: compute a linear regression and analysis of variance on the data; draw a labelled graph with the fitted line; and plant troff code which formats into the analysis of variance table in the document. If the data changes, all you need to do is change the data file; you don't need to touch the troff file itself. I'm not aware that TeX can do this sort of thing at all.) It is also straightforward to "program" troff (i.e. to write macros) which can take output from a database and format this into tables etc. I don't know how easy it is to do this with TeX. A lot of the more "unusual" things you can do with troff depend on using UNIX filters such as "sed", "awk", "perl" or the many file utilities. For instance, it is easy to write an "awk" script which converts a CSV file exported from Excel into valid troff which formats into a printout of the spreadsheet. And I have written "awk" programs which convert basic troff (including "International" characters, font changes, etc.) into valid WordPerfect files. I'm not sure I could do this for TeX... Clearly I could go on. I'm sorry I'm not fluent enough with TeX to go into it in depth on that side. Hoping this helps, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 17-Jan-02 Time: 10:02:00 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
