5 Sep
2017
5 Sep
'17
4:14 p.m.
On Tue, Sep 05, 2017 at 07:37:16AM -0400, Doug McIlroy wrote:
Here's a classic use:
Since groff is not WYSIWYG, the experimental cycle is long:
edit - save - groff - view. In many cases that cycle can be
short-circuited by typing straight into groff -a.
If that is the one that makes pic try to do stuff in ascii I've used
that a lot in the days of yore.
I've found, maybe it's no longer true, but back when I was at Sun 25
years ago, that I got farther with execs if I formatted my stuff two
ways: as postscript (or PDF today) and as ascii. I would send the
ascii version with a header that said "Read this, this is what I
was babbling about, there is a printable version attached".
It was crazy but my influence with the execs went way up and I came
to the conclusion they didn't read attachments.
That's probably all changed, everyone has a mailer that formats
html and people send their stuff that way.
But there's another use for -a.
p) Remove the '-a' option (the ASCII
approximation output).
I didn't even know this existed. Looking at what it spits out, I find
myself wondering what good it is. Is this for Unix troff compatibility?
For people who didn't even have glass TTYs and needed to imagine what
the typeset output would look like?