> Lars_Hellstrom wrote:
>> Larry McVoy wrote:
>>> I don't understand the desire to move away from nroff.  It's not broken,
>>> why fix it?

>> One reason could be that the number of developers who can maintain
>> documentation written in nroff is dwindling. It doesn't help that something
>> isn't broken if hardly anyone understands how to modify it anymore; what
>> used to be editable source is then effectively becoming an unmodifiable
>> binary instead.

>> My experience, coming late to the traditional Unix tools, is:
>> 1. I find it very difficult to read nroff source (despite having mastered
>> several obscure file formats in my life).
>> 2. I have been unable to find any significant documentation of the format.

> That's historically been a real problem.  (For many years,
> most Unices came equipped with nroff(1), since man(1) uses it,
> but unless you paid big $$$ for the "Documenter's Workbench"
> you didn't get any documentation at all on the file format!)

> Fortunately most of the original documentation has been liberated:
> see <URL: http://troff.org/papers.html >.  Joe Ossanna's
> reference manual (CSTR#54) is quite good.

> The Heirloom Project has revised and updated documentation
> for the DWB toolchain as well:

>     <URL: http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html >

> Lastly, the groff manual (which, somewhat ironically,
> is in GNU Info format) is also decent (though IMO it
> suffers from the typical GNU problem where it reads like
> it wants to be a novel instead of a reference manual..)

> Troff, much like vi, is actually rather straightforward
> and can be pleasant to use once you get the basic principles.
> (And, much like vi, if the basic principles *haven't* been
> explained, it's a nightmare.  Come to think of it, the
> same applies to Tcl...)

> --Joe English

> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---
> Virtualization & Cloud Management Using Capacity Planning
> Cloud computing makes use of virtualization - but cloud computing
> also focuses on allowing computing to be delivered as a service.
> http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51521223/
> _______________________________________________
> Tcl-Core mailing list
> Tcl-C...@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tcl-core