All done in troff I believe. Though not for long, I think they switched to framemaker around then. Whoops, I'm wrong, I looked, that's clearly framemaker. Sigh. I love me some troff, even to this day. I really really really wish that someone had done framemaker, word, whatever, that was the GUI interface that had troff under the covers. Why? Because you can version control the source and diffs will actually make sense. Best of luck doing that with any GUI editor. On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 03:55:30PM -0700, Cory Smelosky wrote: -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm

On Wed, 12 Apr 2017, Toby Thain wrote: Heh, yeah. I'd defy anyone to typeset a Bible with troff, but I did it reasonably well with XeLaTeX. -uso.

On 12 April 2017 at 22:25, Toby Thain <toby(a)telegraphics.com.au> wrote (in part): [...] Tanenbaum wrote all his tomes in troff, praising it in his prefaces, and it comes with MacOS (bit of an amusement, that). N.

On 2017-04-12 10:25 PM, Toby Thain wrote: Since it was a bit unclear from context: I'm referring to TeX here and below.

Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: |On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 10:13:33PM -0400, Toby Thain wrote: |> On 2017-04-12 7:31 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: |>>All done in troff I believe. Though not for long, I think they switched |>>to framemaker around then. |>> |>>Whoops, I'm wrong, I looked, that's clearly framemaker. Sigh. I love me |>>some troff, even to this day. I really really really wish that someone |>>had done framemaker, word, whatever, that was the GUI interface that had |>>troff under the covers. Why? Because you can version control the source |> |> You can get really really close to that dream with TeX based tools \ |> like LyX, |> etc (and indeed Blue Sky Research had a wysiwyg TeX system back in \ |> the late |> 1980s). | |I know, my dad wrote a book with Blue Sky Research's stuff. | |> 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. To me that was the german translation of ISO C, by Prof. Dr. A.-T. Schreiner and Dr. Ernst Janich, "set in pic (by Kernighan), tbl (by Lesk), eqn (by Kernighan and Cherry), a XENIC-fit device- independent troff by ELAN". Except for being afraid the wonderful introduction could, possibly and maybe, today have been collaborated in Google Doc, i also adore roff. I came via (La, then) TeX and a package i have written myself, and of which i was very proud, and because i could be. Unfortunately this has been lost, in major parts. I came to roff myself because of this apocalypse -- you know, i come from C64, DOS, Windows, HTML, Javascript and perl, over the German (for me: ex-) magazine c't to Linux, JAVA, C++, x86 Assembler and then C, which is likely and maybe unfortunately so completely different to all of you, and during the JAVA time i bought the TeX book, the c't has had articles about TeX, quite often so, so i knew about it. (I tried lout for a short time, first, but it was not flexible enough.) Unfortunately roff has had no promoters in Germany at all, in anything i read. Roff has weaknesses due to its by-line layout mode, compared to TeX's by-paragraph and even by-page (visible white) one. (Note i have no idea of what happened on the TeX side in the last, say, about 15 years. TeXLive has always been too large for me, i have the KerTeX basics laying around since a few years, just in case i ever find time to come back to TeX.) This can be a problem for quick use cases that do not allow proper reviews and fine-tuning, the latter sometimes down to the paragraph level, dependent on the material. In TeX this can be tuned more easily with conservative values and looking out for "overfull boxes" (iirc), if such occur at all, then. My finding is that, with groff, i can produce papers (mostly letters) of almost identical beauty with some fine-tuning, with almost the identical number of "markup" (which is now also easily typed with the american keyboard). And the fine-tuning i like, because i adore the calligraphic as an art, as an act of devotion of the calligrapher, to some higher spirit or the being as such, and spending some seconds in some text is my simple Boche equivalence to those fine spirits. --steffen

Toby Thain <toby(a)telegraphics.com.au> wrote: |On 2017-04-13 9:41 AM, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: |> ... |> i have no idea of what happened on the TeX side in the last, say, |> about 15 years. TeXLive has always been too large for me, i have | |They have a small "basic" version with the essentials, a hundred |megabytes or so. | |http://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html Oh, ok, now MacTeX basic, 110 MB. That is really much, much better, for me, that is. I never used TeX since then, so i cannot really tell -- my KerTeX repo ball is 11 MB.. ... |> My finding is that, with groff, i can produce papers (mostly |> letters) of almost identical beauty with some fine-tuning, with |> almost the identical number of "markup" (which is now also easily |> typed with the american keyboard). And the fine-tuning i like, |> because i adore the calligraphic as an art, as an act of devotion |> of the calligrapher, to some higher spirit or the being as such, |> and spending some seconds in some text is my simple Boche |> equivalence to those fine spirits. | |Indeed, as a typographer, I believe details matter, no matter what the |audience. I think Knuth feels the same way. :) It is really perfectly looking. Maybe too perfect, in the sense of, maybe even aseptic. At least when having handmade, artistic calligraphy as a personal optimum. But this is of course strange for business letters, and doesn't excuse irregular holes in between words all over the page, as can be seen in non-optimized roff. --steffen

On 13 April 2017 at 20:40, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote: You do have your choice of fonts. (I prefer palatino for text and euler for math. I haven't used cm fonts in decades.) N.

On 2017-04-13 8:40 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: Yes, the font uniformity is unfortunate. Personally I think we're long overdue for a replacement default typeface family, or better yet, diversity (but the underlying engine I think is fine -- and so does Adobe -- it powers InDesign's paragraph composer :) --T

Of course, these days, there's a version of troff that borrows TeX's layout rules, while also adding vastly improved font handling, support for the most useful/widely used groff extensions, and more. Why Heirloom troff isn't more widely used is a puzzle for the ages. Mike

On 2017-04-14 9:56 AM, Michael Kerpan wrote: No matter how far you tart up the former, Troff and TeX just aren't playing the same ballgame. --T

On 2017-04-15 11:27 AM, Clem Cole wrote: Perhaps moreso than I intended. In any case, my 2nd post clarifies what I meant about the two tools being very, very different even if they "both work" for some tasks. --T

On Saturday, 15 April 2017 at 11:27:49 -0400, Clem Cole wrote: FWIW, I grew up with TeX, but when I wrote "Porting UNIX Software" for O'Reilly, they wanted the markup in groff with their adaptation of the mm macro set. I was game, and it worked well. And then I discovered I didn't want to go back to TeX. I stuck with groff, and 20 years later I'm still using it. From the source of that book (P 120 of the printed version): .Pe More than anywhere else in porting, it is good for your state of mind to steer clear of .TXI \& internals. The assumptions on which the syntax is based differ markedly from those of other programming languages. For example, identifiers may not contain digits, and spaces are required only when the meaning would otherwise be ambiguous (to .TXI , not to you), so the sequence \s10\f(CWfontsize300\fR\s0 is in fact the identifier \s10\f(CWfontsize\fR\s0 followed by the number \s10\f(CW300\fR\s0. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to find any good solid information in the documentation, so you could spend hours trying to solve a minor problem. I have been using .TXI \& frequently for years, and I still find it the most frustrating program I have ever seen.\** .FS When I wrote this sentence, I wondered if I wasn't overstating the case. Mike Loukides, the author of \fIProgramming with GNU Software\fR, reviewed the final draft and added a single word: \fIAmen\fR. .FE .TXI was a macro that inserted a roughly correctly formatted Tex emblem. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

Have you tried the Free Pascal Compiler? Its pretty much become the standard for Pascal these days and runs on just about everything (including modern Macs). It also supports most of the modern Pascal dialect such as Delphi et al. Clem On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 9:07 AM, Wolfgang Helbig <helbig(a)mailbox.org> wrote:

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.

Steve Simon <steve(a)quintile.net> wrote: |i haven't tried it in anger but bwk's pm(1) troff post-proscessor, \ |which does paragraph at at a time layout, is available as a plan9 package. \ |written in c++ so early that cfront will compile it. I cannot find this? I only found occurrences of the macro package, which seems to adjust some -ms macro for better vertical stretching and widow avoidance? Also nice, but not a generic approach. --steffen

Steve Simon <steve(a)quintile.net> wrote: |I apologise for misleading tuhs, pm does not do paragraph at a time \ |formatting; memory is not what it used to be. | |It does have some interesting ideas nonetheless - and I have been inspired \ |to try it again. | |The code and macros should be here: | |[1]http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/contrib/steve/pm.tbz[/1] Got it. |[I haven't been able to check as i am on holiday] | |The paper describing it is here: | |[2]https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/compsystems/1989/spr_kernighan\ |.pdf[/2] Have and read this, too. This seems to be very interesting, again (it is Kernighan). It will take a long time until i will be able to truly understand it with all of the context it comes from and lives in, though. Thanks for the pointer! --steffen