[TerryP]

Originally Posted by ephemera

so why did Knuth create TeX if troff was already available at the time?

> I preferred if he worked on improving Troff instead of waisting 10 years of his life to code TeX from the scratch.

the man is known as the father of computer science and his intellect/achievements exceeds that of all of us combined. do you really think he would "waste" 10 years of his life creating TeX without a compelling reason for doing so?

Originally Posted by DrJ

I'll not let facts get in the way of healthy speculation, but I would guess that Knuth simply got interested in text processing and thought he could improve the state-of-the-art. Academics are free to do that -- there need be no real "reason". That troff was closed at the time was likely a motivation.

Far be it from me to try and second guess the likes of Donald Knuth (who I greatly respect), but in my personal opinion: his decision to create TeX likely involved a desire to employ literate programming techniques, a love of algorithms and the finding and solving of interesting problems, along with a desire to eat his cake and have it too by the end of it.



I personally use LaTeX for most of my documents that are desired for printed form. I almost never print anything, but I consider PDF/PostScript output to be like a "digital paper", so to speak. I generally gave up on word processors and the hole WYSIWYG paradigm - I need a system that I can rely on to print what I want, how I want, and not to require a lot of hand tweaking between different editors, printers, and displays to keep it that way. LaTeX generally offers that, or "close enough" to it, that I can just work on content and structure, without care about final appearance until after the document is written. Not having to (ab)use the M4 macro processor and Perl to maintain larger documents involving indexes and references is also a great help (and why I stopped using HTML/CSS for this). Most of what I do, is built around toolkits. A set of tools that I can use together to create something larger, without a headache in the process; LaTeX has proven to be extremely useful but I would never rule out other tools.



For anyone wanting to learn TeX/LaTeX I would suggest buying a good book and finding an online reference. I never bought a book, but you can find some of the links I use on my ma.gnolia profile - the first of which is the main kind of docs I needed to learn. For troff the best I've seen is the old troff users manual and a tutorial by BWK, there's also a few other things on here that DrJ has referenced, and your *nix systems should have documentation on the various macro packages and pre processors.

Originally Posted by DrJ

That said, knowing both troff and TeX is worthwhile. They are both tool chains that have integrity, and both are worth knowing. They are similar in concept, different in execution, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Would you give up PHP to know Ruby?

Well spoken ;-)