Re: [Groff] Why is it...

[Blake McBride]

LaTeX does produce beautiful documents.  Groff can too.  Ignoring the 
mathematical formula support which I don't use, I thought I'd share a 
couple of opinions regarding TeX, LaTeX and Groff.

LaTeX produces absolutely beautiful documents right out of the box.  
Minor modifications to the way LaTeX wants things are simple and 
effective.  The problem is when you want to do more complex macros or 
modifications to LaTeX's defaults.  The fight and research needed is 
unbelievable.  I have been a computer programmer for over 25 years.  
I've even written my own programming language.  I have never found 
anything as complex and confusing than TeX or LaTeX programming!  The 
simplest of changes has taken me eight hours!  I know there are others 
out there who understand TeX and LaTeX but these people are either a lot 
smarter than me or spend far to much time and effort to learn it.  I 
either except LaTeX defaults or spend endless hours with trial and error 
as well as posting on the net.

Groff is so simple and strait forward in my experience.  It's relatively 
easy to understand and program.  Groff beats the pants off TeX in terms 
of understandability.  This means that Groff is much, much easier to 
understand, use, customize, and extend than TeX.  And in the end, Groff 
can produce documents equally good to TeX.

I think the big thing keeping people from making more use of Groff is 
the macro packages.  mm, me, etc. are antiquated and too rudimentary in 
my opinion.  mom is much better but still falls very short of LaTeX.  
The sectioning ability of LaTeX, for example, is an absolute necessity 
(you know, chapters, sections, subsections, and subsubsections all 
related to each other).  The are many other examples too.  I think that 
mom could be brought up to speed, and that could make all the difference.

Michael Kerpan wrote:
> ...that groff/troff seems to be written off by so many as "obsolete"
> and "only useful for man pages", despite the fact that it can do
> everything that TeX/LaTeX (seemingly the favored non-WYSIWYG document
> processor) can do but while taking up 3 megabytes (as opposed to the
> 300 or so used by the average TeX install) It can't be ease of use, as
> *roff plus -me, -mm or -ms is no harder to use than LaTeX or HTML. It
> can't be availability as the *roff family is basically a required
> component of any Unix-like system. It can't even be font support,
> given that it's MUCH easier to install and use random PostScript fonts
> in groff than in TeX... What gives and how can we fix it?
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