Re: [TUHS] a book (was Re: PWB vs Unix/TS)

Larry McVoy writes: I feel worse. I probably did meet him but was a kid and didn't know he would be special. BTW, I still use troff for lots of stuff. I know that tex is more capable, but troff is burned into my dna. I started with roff when I wrote my first BTL technical memorandum and later moved to nroff. Never actually used the C/A/T at BTL but I remember the smell of the developer and pages hanging out to dry. I find the tex language a bit ugly, but that's just my taste. I have piles of crufty packages cobbled together around it, but they're not really fit for use by others. I like to write in troff because it allows me to think about what I want to say without worrying about how I want it to look until later. Probably the ugliest tool is the one that I used to convert my book from troff into office because my publisher wouldn't take troff. Converted everything into openoffice xml format. Extracted all of the diagrams and tables, ran them through separately, then through ps2pdf then pdf2svg, and then inkscape for cropping to generate svg images for all of the art since they're the only scalable image format understood by office. Way back in the 80s when scheduling was new I wrote tools that generated pert and gantt charts via pic. The power of little and languages and composability lives on! Jon