5 Sep
2017
5 Sep
'17
5:37 p.m.
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? 
5 Sep
5 Sep
7:27 p.m.
New subject: It is time to modernise "groff"
On 5 Sep 2017, at 12:37, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> 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.
doug
i take a different approach.
i try to minimise the number of edit, troff, view cycles by typing as much of the text in
as i can before viewing, relying on troff, tbl, and friends to make it look good.
this stops me from being distracted by layout and keeps me on the important stuff - the
content.
the fact that troff is slower to display proofs than a WYSIWYG editor is, IMHO, a positive
advantage.
-Steve
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? 
8:40 p.m.
New subject: It is time to modernise "groff"
So for those who want WYSIWYG this little script helps. I call it "g"
and you run it like so
g groff -ms -t my_tables.ms
in a terminal (or use &) and it will pop up gv on the processed file[s].
It sits in a loop and stats all the files and if any have changed it
reruns the roff and tells gv.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
8:14 p.m.
New subject: It is time to modernise "groff"
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?
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3 comments
3 participants
participants (3)
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Doug McIlroy -
Larry McVoy -
Steve Simon