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Old 9th November 2008
DrJ DrJ is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Gold Country, CA
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Off topic to pcc...

Personally I don't think there is anything wrong with groff (which these days I use synonymously with troff though that's not quite right). It has many extensions to troff that help quite a bit, and it does pretty much all I need to do. TeX/LaTeX has some added flexibility, but it comes at the expense of greatly increased verbosity (if you use LaTeX). And no one really uses groff without macro packages or the proprocessors. -ms is fine for most things, but there are others, such as -me, -mm and -mom. Support for the groff family also is quite good through a small but dedicated group on a mailing list.

Its main failing I have found is that it is hard to float text around an inserted graphics element, which is important when you have page limits, and that the graphics insertion routines are rather picky about the eps syntax (and you can't use any other format, though you can always convert).

The other limitation is that very few publishers accept troff code, but usually do accept TeX/LaTeX code. That is a *major* problem. Some accept a submission in PDF format, but many more do not.

I also think that the computer modern font Knuth developed is downright ugly. I understand the motivation for its development, but there is a reason that type designers didn't come up with something like it. I know you can use others, but Times Roman is just a better default (not that it is my favorite either).
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