16 Sep
2019
16 Sep
'19
2:49 a.m.
On 15/09/2019 20:35, Clem Cole wrote:
On Sat, Sep 14, 2019 at 11:03 PM U'll Be King of the Stars
<ullbeking(a)andrewnesbit.org <mailto:ullbeking@andrewnesbit.org>> wrote:
I've been wondering whether it is possible and worthwhile to use *roff
for complex technical documentation. I've always loved the aesthetic
that books produced using *roff have but there are other reasons too.
Ditto. The books that used roff can look clean and within a series are
usually consistent, but what I've like is that they are different.
Yes, they look clean but different to each other.
I'm guessing that the reason might be that it is easier to exercise
*roff's capabilities than it is to push LaTeX to get good results
without spending a huge amount of time.
The Prentiss-Hall series and the ORA books both were
produced using
troff and different versions of ms, but the results are different.
I wonder if Prentice-Hall and O'Reilly & Associates might be willing to
share their *roff macro sets in an open source way.
One of my complained with LaTex books is they all seem
to look the same.
Don't they ever?! It has gotten to the point that Computer Modern
actually makes me feel *fatigued* when I encounter it when reading, say,
a mathematics monograph.
On the other hand it's the perfect typeface for résumés and CV's for
computer scientists. Like a secret handshake.
Perhaps the reason that the CM typeface is so common is that changing
typefaces in LaTeX is complicated and difficult so authors leave it
alone. At least this has been my experience.
Getting back to *roff, does anybody know if there
is a (hopefully rich)
repository of macros, or any other resources, for my use case?
I've never seen one. As far as I knew it, publishers sometimes seeded
authors. ORA used the Masscomp/Tektronix derived version of ms (-mS)
that Steve Talbot created (and Rick LeFaivre originally created from the
original Lesk V7 set). Rich Steven's has his own additions to the
version of ms that came with groff which I have also seen.
This is fascinating insider information, and it leads me full circle to
several reasons why I want to try to use *roff in the first place:
1. Do you think there is any chance of obtaining these macro packages?
Either from authors who haven't passed away, or from the publishing
houses themselves?
2. I get the impression that writing a macro package or editing an
existing is relatively straightforward. Would you agree?
Or, at least, that it makes some kind of sense. I could never make
head or tail of LaTeX's macro extensions. I certainly didn't want to
spend my life trying to figure it out.
I still remember the sinking feeling in my stomach when I realized
that the five (or so) books that make up the de facto canon of LaTeX
user documentation (published by Addison-Wesley) are thousands of pages
in total. I did not want to engage with that.
I have no particular intention to speak ill of LaTeX. Rather, it is my
only point of reference for publishing-grade typesetting and
unfortunately I don't have fond memories of it.
Kind regards,
Andrew
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