🚀 go-pugleaf

At the risk of seeming ignorant (or, even worse, proving what 
everyone already suspects :-) I thought I might offer a "modest
proposal" about a subject which has been banging around  this group
for a couple of weeks now.  Specifically, starting with Louis Mamakos'
post about "gee, they unbundled WriteNow and then dropped the read-only
version. What should I make my documentation in?" we now have arguments
running about bundled versus unbundled software, the value of said
things versus those things added to 3.0, etc.  

Personally, I find the unbundling of a read-only right now rather 
strange, but would guess it has something to do with (1) keeping the
3.0 distribution smaller and (2) (from my cynical side) giving Appsoft
a boost.  

Sadly, there's little to do about it now (except complain, which we're all
quite good at :-) but perhaps I can offer a better solution to Louis' original
question --- i.e. a solution with pagenumbering, headers, etc. which runs on 
any NeXT --- which at least "calms the waters" on one aspect of this 
question.  Why not have everyone put their documentation in troff??  I
just checked and troff seems to be fully installed on both my 105 Mb internal
(I keep a skeleton system in case of "big disc failure") and my external
whcih has the extended OS.  I'm no big troff fan, would have difficulty
writing a letter in it to be honest, but often get documents in it from
collaborators and can obey the instructiosn necessary to view and/or
print it.  Associated figures/screen grabs could be in EPS files numbered
1, 2, 3, .....  which the reader could view as he/she read through the 
document.  I would even assume it's trivial to write a shell script 
that would drive the troff file, and it's figures, to a Postscript (or, 
better yet for those with the full OS, TeX) document?  

It seems to me this would be a great long term solution since troff comes
with all Unix systems --- I don't want to pick a fight, but some have
recently said the NeXT doesn't come with a bundled WP: actually, it comes with
several, nroff, troff, Edit, TeX, etc. It's just that it doesn't come with
WriteNow, which has a particularly convenient combination of features, anymore
--- and there are lots of troff --->> XXXX convertors.  Again, I'm no
troff expert, but is there any reason it couldn't serve as a standard for
documentation?  (I agree that TeX and InfoTeX are out because that would
just be another screw for those with small discs).  

Just my demented thoughts --- Tom