Any reason to learn groff?
casioc...@gmail.com
I'm learning latex. Is there any reason why I should bother with groff
other than knowing that it exists?
I should say that I'm only interested in text - no math, no chemistry,
none of that.
jlrivera
in fact, you should not learn LaTeX if you are a plain luser... you
should be happy with OpenOffice, or something like that...
seems to me you're just trolling.
casioc...@gmail.com
I'm not trolling, but your manners suggest you may be.
But why? why shouldn't I learn LaTeX? I was quite excited to find it. I
could edit LaTeX documents on *any* device that has a plaintext editor,
even including an ipaq or a palm, using *any* plaintext editor, however
primitive. OpenOffice or MS Office are *not* portable across platforms,
devices, and applications as LaTeX is.
roodw...@core.com
I don't know about groff. Never used it. I've been quite happy with
LaTeX. Like you, I don't do math or chemistry. I've written two books
with it largely using the defaults and they look great. Don't get the
idea it's just for scientists or mathematicians. I'm not one.
Except for crappy one-time notes and grocery lists that I print from
Emacs using enscript, everything that I write that goes on paper comes
from LaTeX.
My only use for word processors anymore is when people send me Microsoft
Word files--no matter how much I whine about sending them in plain text
form.
Hopefully one day people will realize they've been conned. They never
needed a word processor.
Of course, I want a pony, too, and my own space rocket.
Nothing stopping you from trying groff. I'd be interested where you
might find it better or easier to use.
But I don't foresee personally switching to LaTeX. To my eye, it's the best.
I rarely post in here because there are plenty of real LaTeX experts in
this group.
Out of curiosity I looked for a groff newsgroup and only found
gnu.groff.bug. Unfortunately it seems to be filled with spam.
--Rod
__________________________
Author of "Linux for Non-Geeks--Clear-eyed Answers for Practical
Consumers" and "Boring Stories from Uncle Rod." To reply by e-mail take
the extra "o" from the name.
Scott Pakin
> I'm learning latex. Is there any reason why I should bother with groff
> other than knowing that it exists?
Probably not. I find LaTeX source to be more readable than roff source,
LaTeX output to be cleaner-looking than roff output, and document formatting
to be easier in LaTeX than in roff because of the zillions of prewritten
macro packages out there (cf. http://www.ctan.org/) which to do just about
anything you'd want. Nowadays, I use groff solely for producing Unix man
pages.
-- Scott
Robin Fairbairns
>casioc...@gmail.com wrote:
>> I'm learning latex. Is there any reason why I should bother with groff
>> other than knowing that it exists?
>>
>> I should say that I'm only interested in text - no math, no chemistry,
>> none of that.
i learned *roff at a time when groff didn't exist, and my firm had no
unix boxes. in order to check my work, i had to write stuff to a tape
and take it in to town to run on my old department's ultrix boxes.
the only thing that actually sticks in my mind about that is the sad
realisation that trailing spaces on a line could be significant.
my advice is: use groff for what it's good at (formatting man pages)
and carry on with latex.
>I don't know about groff. Never used it. I've been quite happy with
>LaTeX. Like you, I don't do math or chemistry. I've written two books
>with it largely using the defaults and they look great. Don't get the
>idea it's just for scientists or mathematicians. I'm not one.
>
>Except for crappy one-time notes and grocery lists that I print from
>Emacs using enscript, everything that I write that goes on paper comes
>from LaTeX.
>
>My only use for word processors anymore is when people send me Microsoft
>Word files--no matter how much I whine about sending them in plain text
>form.
last week, i had to fill out a large form for our insane personnel
department. it was written in word, but it was pretty clear that
personnel don't actually know how to use word, since typing in the
areas i needed to type into changed the layout quite unpleasantly.
i eventually found that i could get word to show what it thought it
was doing, and i could work out how to repair personnel's damage.
i got home in a really bad mood (having handed in the form just before
the deadline). my poor old wife needed an explanation...
so, people who use word all the time can't use it properly.
and word's supposedly designed to be easy to use.
this is something you should bear in mind when people here growl at
you for producing mucky latex. of course, jonathan fine will drive
people who do have off days away from the group, so you shouldn't get
too much trouble.
--
Robin (http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq) Fairbairns, Cambridge
jlrivera
casioc...@gmail.com wrote:
> jlrivera wrote:
> > no.
> >
> > in fact, you should not learn LaTeX if you are a plain luser... you
> > should be happy with OpenOffice, or something like that...
> >
> > seems to me you're just trolling.
>
> I'm not trolling, but your manners suggest you may be.
>
I'm sorry. Looked to me like some sort of provocation; like the other
question on docbook. My best apologies...
> But why? why shouldn't I learn LaTeX? I was quite excited to find it. I
> could edit LaTeX documents on *any* device that has a plaintext editor,
> even including an ipaq or a palm, using *any* plaintext editor, however
> primitive. OpenOffice or MS Office are *not* portable across platforms,
> devices, and applications as LaTeX is.
For the record, I also switched to LaTeX when I was writing my masters
thesis. Got frustrated when M$W*rd changed layout and destroyed my
equations every time I changed from PC or printer---used to work at the
computer lab, home, and my part time job's terminal. It was horrible.
With LaTeX, I didn't care about moving around---I could work even on
the Macs at school, if all PC's were taken.
So yeah!!! Go ahead!!! Join the LaTeX world, by all means!
Cheers,
Luis.
co...@zedat.fu-berlin.de
: I'm learning latex. Is there any reason why I should bother with groff
: other than knowing that it exists?
It's been ages since I last used the runoff family of text processing tools.
I still use it for the occasional manpage, but before learning about LaTeX
(more than 10 years ago) I used the table and bibliography tools of nroff/
troff/groff quite frequently. I gave up that stuff because LaTeX is more
useful for general purposes, and its command structure more intuitive.
Knowing that [tng]roff exists and how its macro packages are invoked is
still useful knowledge, but others might look at you slightly bewildered
if you suggest this environment to people who may have never heard about
it before.
Consult http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/groff/groff.html if you really
want to know more.
Oliver.
--
Dr. Oliver Corff e-mail: co...@zedat.fu-berlin.de
Peter Flynn
>
>
> I'm learning latex. Is there any reason why I should bother with groff
> other than knowing that it exists?
No.
> I should say that I'm only interested in text - no math, no chemistry,
> none of that.
Doesn't matter. LaTeX is quite good at handling text.
///Peter
casioc...@gmail.com
Thanks and regards. :-)
Patrick TJ McPhee
<casioc...@gmail.com> wrote:
% I'm learning latex. Is there any reason why I should bother with groff
% other than knowing that it exists?
I find groff useful for producing tabular material out of programs.
If you don't need to do that, then no.
--
Patrick TJ McPhee
North York Canada
pt...@interlog.com
Giuseppe Bilotta
FWIW, I would suggest the OP try ConTeXt if he's only doing text
things. Or maybe the memoir class in LaTeX.
--
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta
"Da grande lotterò per la pace"
"A me me la compra il mio babbo"
(Altan)
("When I grow up, I will fight for peace"
"I'll have my daddy buy it for me")
casioc...@gmail.com
Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 23:14:05 +0000, Peter Flynn wrote:
>
> > casioc...@gmail.com wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> I'm learning latex. Is there any reason why I should bother with groff
> >> other than knowing that it exists?
> >
> > No.
> >
> >> I should say that I'm only interested in text - no math, no chemistry,
> >> none of that.
> >
> > Doesn't matter. LaTeX is quite good at handling text.
>
> FWIW, I would suggest the OP try ConTeXt if he's only doing text
> things. Or maybe the memoir class in LaTeX.
>
Hi, what's the advantage of conTeXt over LaTeX?
Giuseppe Bilotta
> Hi, what's the advantage of conTeXt over LaTeX?
It's more easily customizable, has a humongous amount of features
built it without the need to load a gazillion packages and makes
extensive use of pdf and e-tex features when present/request.
--
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta
"E la storia dell'umanitŕ, babbo?"
"Ma niente: prima si fanno delle cazzate,
poi si studia che cazzate si sono fatte"
(Altan)
("And what about the history of the human race, dad?"
"Oh, nothing special: first they make some foolish things,
then you study what foolish things have been made")
casioc...@gmail.com
Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
> On 1 Nov 2005 10:23:28 -0800, casioc...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > Hi, what's the advantage of conTeXt over LaTeX?
>
> It's more easily customizable, has a humongous amount of features
> built it without the need to load a gazillion packages and makes
> extensive use of pdf and e-tex features when present/request.
Thanks, I have a concern about how widespread it is compared to LaTeX
and what its future may be. I got the impression that ConTeXt is more
like a one-man-effort whereas LaTeX is everywhere. Am I mistaken?
Would LaTeX3 make ConTeXt redundant or obsolete? Would it be easy for
me to switch between LaTeX and ConTeXt and convert documents from
either into the other?
Thanks.
Giuseppe Bilotta
> Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
>> [7 quoted lines suppressed]
>
> Thanks, I have a concern about how widespread it is compared to LaTeX
> and what its future may be. I got the impression that ConTeXt is more
> like a one-man-effort whereas LaTeX is everywhere. Am I mistaken?
No, but I wouldn't be afraid about ConTeXt disappearing. It does have
a smaller user base than LaTeX, though, yes.
> Would LaTeX3 make ConTeXt redundant or obsolete?
Neither, AFAICT.
> Would it be easy for
> me to switch between LaTeX and ConTeXt and convert documents from
> either into the other?
Well, the most basic stuff is easy to convert. Much of the most
advanced stuff in ConTeXt however is not available in LaTeX at all (in
the sense that nobody has written a package for it) or has a totally
different interface, so conversion would be more of a problem.
--
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta
"E la storia dell'umanità, babbo?"
Brooks Moses
> Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
>>On 1 Nov 2005 10:23:28 -0800, casioc...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>Hi, what's the advantage of conTeXt over LaTeX?
>>
>>It's more easily customizable, has a humongous amount of features
>>built it without the need to load a gazillion packages and makes
>>extensive use of pdf and e-tex features when present/request.
>
> Thanks, I have a concern about how widespread it is compared to LaTeX
> and what its future may be. I got the impression that ConTeXt is more
> like a one-man-effort whereas LaTeX is everywhere. Am I mistaken?
Well, ConTeXt _is_ included in the latest teTeX distributions, for
instance. It's a bit more of a one-man effort, yes, but then so was
LaTeX in the early days.
The main difference between the two, in my opinion, is a philosophical
one: LaTeX was created with the idea of separating content and
presentation to such an extent that the typical author would write their
content and then use a style file created by someone else to provide the
visual presentation. Thus, the proliferation of style files and related
things.
ConTeXt, on the other hand, retained the idea of separating content and
presentation, but was created with the idea of being used for books,
where each book tends to have a different layout, and so the expected
"end user" is the person doing all the layout. Thus, it's designed to
provide a vast amount of flexibility for layout in a way that can be
fairly easily defined without needing to write a package (or go find one
that's already written).
To some extent, modern LaTeX has become a lot more like ConTeXt's
intent, with a large quantity of packages, and classes like "memoir"
that are designed to give the end user a large amount of control of the
visual presentation. Thus, the difference is more one of focus and
arrangement -- ConTeXt is all "of a piece" and most things are built in
and designed as a complete set, whereas with LaTeX it's generally the
case that when you want to do something different, you need to find the
right package, and sometimes find that there are three that almost do
what you want and none that are quite right (but, then, that also means
that there are usually choices for how to do things, which can be good.)
Another difference is that IMO, ConTeXt is a lot easier to program in.
It was designed a fair bit later than LaTeX, for much faster computers,
and thus includes a lot of things that make it load and run slower but
make programming a lot easier.
> Would LaTeX3 make ConTeXt redundant or obsolete? Would it be easy for
> me to switch between LaTeX and ConTeXt and convert documents from
> either into the other?
In my experience, if you're not doing anything fancy and not doing any
math, it's nearly trivial to move content from LaTeX to ConTeXt. The
document preamble and a small handful of commands need to be changed,
but the vast bulk of the text can stay the same.
On the other hand, it's a bit harder to transfer the visual presentation
from LaTeX to ConTeXt or vice versa. And I also think there's much less
reason to do that....
Personally, I use both LaTeX and ConTeXt, with about half of my
documents in each. I use ConTeXt for projected presentations and
book-like things, and LaTeX for quick paper-like documents and
scientific papers, and the math has really been the only thing that's
been difficult to translate. (And I'm working, slowly, on making that
easier.)
- Brooks
--
The "bmoses-nospam" address is valid; no unmunging needed.
Werner Lemberg
> In article <1130726117.1...@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
> <casioc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> % I'm learning latex. Is there any reason why I should bother with groff
> % other than knowing that it exists?
> I find groff useful for producing tabular material out of programs.
> If you don't need to do that, then no.
> --
It's probably a matter of taste too. Now we (the groff people) have the
`mom' macro package, specifically developed by a novel writer for -- writing
novels.
Additionally, there is the quite powerful `pic' preprocessor for producing
graphics which even has an interface to (La)TeX.
If you want formatted plain text output, LaTeX fails miserably in most
situations, while groff has been specifically designed to handle this too
(using a special output device, grotty).
Werner
George N. White III
> I'm learning latex. Is there any reason why I should bother with groff
> other than knowing that it exists?
Groff is based on (t)roff, which was a significant milestone.
Read the troff papers and play with groff, along with (g)pic, (g)eqn, and
(g)tbl and you will appreciate tex more fully.
> I should say that I'm only interested in text - no math, no chemistry,
> none of that.
Figures, tables, multi-column layouts? Everyone needs a bit of math,
countless examples exist where whole forests were lost to an attempt to
explain something with words when a few logs would have been enough for
the right equation. Of course that doesn't much matter now, as google
will never find that equation and people will only ever see the verbiage.
There are still legacy formats (unix man pages) that use groff, although
for that purpose groff is overkill and awf might be the thing to learn
if you want to write them in a way that the largest number of people can
use.
In distant the past I used nroff to format database reports in minutes on
an early Mac (or hours on a PC) that were taking secretaries days to
complete. Come to think of it, people coming to computing and typesetting
these days can't really appreciate what it was like working with the
typing pool. Imagine showing someone used to putting in many hours of
unpaid overtime at a Selectric how to double their thruput for
1/10th the effort -- they can devote a whole morning to your messy
equation, take a long lunch hour to recover, and the boss is happy too.
--
George N. White III <aa...@chebucto.ns.ca>
John Culleton
>
> Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
>> On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 23:14:05 +0000, Peter Flynn wrote:
>>
>> > casioc...@gmail.com wrote:
>> >
>> >>
>> >> I'm learning latex. Is there any reason why I should bother with groff
>> >> other than knowing that it exists?
>> >
>> > No.
>> >
>> >> I should say that I'm only interested in text - no math, no chemistry,
>> >> none of that.
>> >
>> > Doesn't matter. LaTeX is quite good at handling text.
>>
>> FWIW, I would suggest the OP try ConTeXt if he's only doing text
>> things. Or maybe the memoir class in LaTeX.
>>
>
> Hi, what's the advantage of conTeXt over LaTeX?
>
Contest is all in one place with one author in charge. It is newer and hence
more in tune with creating interactive files for the internet. It will do
imposition. It allows for multiple formats from a single source file with
the setting of a switch. It has structuring commands that are more in tune
with a non-fiction book, e.g., \startfrontmatter \stopfrontmatter and so
on. It has a handy command for suppressing headers and footers, useful for
title pages and the like. It will do tricks like unequal width multiple
columns. It has a specialized set of macros to create drawings etc. with
Metapost, inline with the regular code.
I did my first book in LaTeX but I would never go back to it now. I use
plain pdftex for novels and Context for non-fiction. and I charge money for
my efforts.
Those writing text-heavy books without a lot of illos etc. may wish to
consider plain pdftex. It makes the work go quickly. But if the format is
at all complex I run right to Context.
From my conversations with ex-TeXers I find that most of them got turned off
by LaTeX, not plain TeX, often while in college.
YMMV of course.
--
John Culleton
Able Indexers and Typesetters