Hi Martin,

On Tue Jan 21, 2025 at 4:31 PM CET, Martin Lemaire wrote:
> [...]
> As a tool initially thought in order to normalize the writing of a
> thesis and the production of patents, can you think of any typeset
> productions made using (g)(t)r(un)off that step away from the default
> font and composition decisions ? [...]

The most non-idiomatic roff macro package I can think of is meta, which
was apparently an experiment to write roff in the same way as LaTeX:
  http://cowlark.com/meta/

Its feature of nested elements in particular is interesting, and has
lead me to experiment with designing macros with composability similar
to HTML/CSS. Unfortunately, it quickly turned into a very buggy pile of
abstractions and complexity. My conclusion from the whole endeavor was
that the reason troff isn't the sort of complicated mess LaTeX is, is
precisely because it doesn't try to abstract stuff away and does things
in the simplest way possible. This means you have to support elaborate
typesetting demands yourself, but also that it's much easier to
understand and debug.

~ onf

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