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Originally Posted by JMJ_coder
I have never used Troff (or any others in the roff family). I have used TeX/LaTeX a little bit in my exploring various typesetting solutions, but didn't get that far as I started to concentrate at the time into musical typesetting - for which I use Lilypond (which itself could be greatly improved).
Is the roff family capable of any typesetting task presented to it - or is it just the syntax is so unnatural that it is hard to learn?
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GNU Troff is very capable system but it is very crude if you just use standard packages and pre-processors. I have never tried to use Troff to type music. I would imagine that mom package might have capabilities to typeset music. I have tried to use TeX to type music but I think that Lilypond is much more capable.
This might be an interesting reading for you
http://www.tug.org/interviews/interv...r-lemberg.html
By the way Werer Lemberg is current maintainer of Troff. He has significantly contributed to LaTeX, and he is professional composer by occupation so he uses Lilypond on daily basis.
Speaking of Troff syntax I find it little bit more difficult than TeX but I have used TeX thousand times more than Troff. It is OK actually. Why don't you try. There are enough documents on the net to get you start with the simple document in Troff. Unix in the Nutshell has a good short introduction.
Lets face it. Any markup language is far beyond capabilities of most desktop users. Don't forget most Windows users are not like Dr. J who uses Windows because he has to run specific software.