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Old 9th November 2008
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Oko Oko is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JMJ_coder View Post
What do you see as the failings of troff that Knuth should have improved or cleaned up?
You are asking very complex questions. Have you used Troff (Groff)? Have you used TeX or at least LaTeX? Even if do not have high typographic requirements you will see that Troff is not very flexible. If you need new macros or even unusual spacing that is major thing in Troff. In TeX is almost trivial. Troff has almost nonhuman syntax comparing to TeX (which is almost nonhuman for most humans).
I am a mathematician. Mathematics is the major strength of TeX. In Troff on the another hand you either have to do real programming in order to type mathematics or to use math pre-processor which is fantastic and typical Unix idea. You pipe formulas through math pre-processor before you send to Troff.

Troff has very limiting text editing capabilities. You see before people start using computers for publishing the process of writing a book was something like

writer--->typesetter----->editor----> typsetter--->printing press

You see the major quality of TeX (LaTeX) in particular was that erased the need for typesetter and editor. The writer become typesetter and
TeX became very good book/paper editor. Troff has rather limited capabilities in that sense.

There is also lesser known aspect of TeX which is Metafont. That is a major advance in computer calligraphy. Troff never rose much above
ATT internal typographic system used for internal documentation.
By the time GNU Troff (Groff) appeared TeX was way too good for Troff to pick up.

What I really like about Troff is that is written in pure C. It is lighting fast. It does really good job if you stay within the frame of couple available pre-processors.

What I hate about TeX is that is an ugly interpreter even though implements some of finest and most original algorithms ( line breaking comes to mind). I also can not swallow the fact that TeX is coded in Pascal. It is never the less probably the most ported peace of software out there. It is also very bloated. Current standard Unix distribution TeXLive is almost 1Gb for all packages. On the another hand Troff 1.19 (Unfortunately the one in base of the OpenBSD is 1.15 version which is not
tragic having in mind that Troff almost doesn't develop) is I think only 5MB or something like that. Trust me I could easily impress you by typing math paper in Troff even though it is 200 smaller than TeXLive.

Troff is at last released by Caldera. Heirloom Project maintain the original code which is more or less obsolete due to the significant progress made in Groff.
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