Re: Learning troff - where to start?

[Damian McGuckin]

On Wed, 14 Oct 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

> On Wednesday, 14 October 2020 at 11:12:26 +1100, Damian McGuckin wrote:
> > On Wed, 14 Oct 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> >
> > > I do, notably the PostScript display requests.
> >
> > If you mean the
> >
> >         \X'ps: file ....'
> >
> > OK. Point taken although older troff could handle that also from
> > memory.  But it is so long ago, I cannot remember how.
>
> Yes, that's the way it is for me too.  I wrote the macros about 25
> years ago for "The Complete FreeBSD", and I haven't looked at them in
> over 10 years.  I did today, and I found it a real rat's nest of
> documentation.  Strangely the macro code was much more readable.  But
> that brings us back to where we came in: where is there
> well-structured documentation for the current groff?

Agreed.  It is not there.

Maybe the old O'Reilly book needs a revision?

Would O'Reilly release the source code of the book so it could be updated?

I wrote a book on how to write reports using troff with MM. I then started 
writing my own book in 1985 on Troff and the various preprocessors but as 
soon as I saw UTP, gave up.

I liked 'lout'. Very clean. Jeffrey Kingstonm was just down the road from 
the office. Smart guy.

Regards - Damian

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