13 Apr
2017
13 Apr
'17
4:14 p.m.
On 12 April 2017 at 22:20, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
[...]
I started off with troff (on Suns) and then the dep't installed (La)TeX. I
switched to LaTeX because I was writing math and it looks better in the
latter (as Knuth intended). I dabbled with TeX but never stuck to it -- too
much like assembler. Interestingly, the secretarial staff learnt TeX and
the grad students all used LaTeX.
At work, we once used noweb (and xfig and pstex) to document our code.
This was well before doxygen and I think it worked fairly well (despite the
extra steps).
N.
While troff
can get stuff done in its area, for heavy duty work and exacting
typography, TeX's markup blows troff out of the water, I am afraid.
I'd like to learn more about that. I'd done a ton of stuff in troff,
had to do a paper recently in LaTex and I did not find it at all better.
It was a technical paper, usual stuff, text and tables and figures
and references. I'm not great at LaTex so maybe it's just my bias
but I really like troff. In fairness, I like groff, I got James to hack
some stuff into pic for me.
But it started with troff. I still remember walking out of the computer
science bookstore with a copy of the troff manual. That was sort of my
introduction to Unix and it fits.