Robin Chatterjee wrote:
> what about roff/troff/nroff... they are also or large document
> formatting. And I recall that some well known book ( was it
> kernighan/pike ? ) was toally typeset in troff.
> Cheerio
> Robin
Yes, groff (which is *roff on Linux) is good for typesetting large
documents. Robin's right -- Kernighan and Pike was typeset completely
in troff. So was Kernighan and Ritchie, so are all *nix manuals
(online and hardcopy). So are all Bell Labs publications. Interestingly so were all the
perhaps, so were all books by the late W. Richard Stevens.
Groff can produce PS, dvi or plain text output. Xfig can be used to
produce figures that can be included in a groff document. PostScript
or EPS can be included, too. Groff has excellent support for tables
and equations.
The major problem is lack of readily available documentation. The
final chapter of Kernighan and Pike is a lucid (how else could it be!)
introduction to groff and its various preprocessors. But not all the
nitty-gritty is covered there, naturally. The comp.sources.unix site has
all the dcumentation, but these have to be downloaded. They are pretty
voluminous, printed they would run into a hundred-odd pages. But they are
complete. For users already familiar with *roff, W.R. Stevens' homepage
(www.kohala.com) has more documentation and utilities, especially for
using pic, the groff picture processor.
Another possible source of the documentation in hardcopy form are
the old Unix manuals (from the days when Unix was still owned by Bell
Labs and was free; this had changed by the late eighties). HCL used
to give a very complete set with their Horizon-III and Magnum series
computers (which is where I learnt most of *roff from). Somewhere some
of these manuals might still be lying, gathering dust. The computers
to which these were accompaniments are long gone, though!
Having said all this, I'll say that if someone were beginning to learn
typesetting and had a choice between groff and LaTeX, they should go for
LaTeX (although I, myself, use groff exclusively). LaTeX is more modern,
it has more support and more readily available documentation and is
portable across operating systems. Lyx is a (nice) graphical front end
to LaTeX, I'm told.
- Manas Laha.
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