> On 4/25/2021 10:43 PM, TK Chia wrote:
[..]
> > troff (as groff) is still very much alive today, as far as I can tell.
> > And the troff format is still the default source format for man pages on
> > Linux. It is quite a good format for the job, if you ask me.
On Mon, Apr 26, 2021 at 1:54 AM Ralf Quint <freedos...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, it all depends on what you are used to. I haven't used any of that
> troff (etc) stuff in +30 years now, ever since GUI deskops and apps for
> it started to become usable.
[..]
BTW, if anyone is interested in troff (or variants) there's an
interesting history in Brian Kernighan's book, "Unix: A History and a
Memoir." It starts on page 98. In brief:
Jerry Saltzer's Runoff program was an early text formatting system,
originally for CTSS. It used macros like this:
.ce
This is a centered (ce) line.
.ti 5
This line has a starting text indent (ti) of 5 spaces.
While at MIT, Kernighan wrote a simple implementation of Runoff called
Roff ("an abbreviated Runoff")
Joe Ossanna at Bell Labs (Unix team) later wrote a similar but more
powerful implementation called Nroff (for "New Roff") that generated
output suitable for the typewriter-like printers at the time
When the Unix team acquired a phototypesetting machine, Joe made
significant updates to Nroff to create Troff (for "Typesetter Roff")
to drive the typesetter
Kernighan later updated Troff to become the Device Independent Troff
(still called "Troff" but I've also seen this referenced as "ditroff")
with a typesetter description language that allowed Troff to produce
output for different kinds of devices
And much later, GNU wrote a new implementation called Groff ("GNU Roff")
I've written a few articles for OpenSource.com about using groff. The
latest one is here:
https://opensource.com/article/21/4/groff-programmer
(It even includes a groff source file using the "-me" macros)
At the time, writing documents in nroff/troff/groff was as common as
writing documentation in Markdown today.
Jim
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