🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <765@nrcvax.UUCP> terry@nrcvax.UUCP (Terry Grevstad) writes:
> I love troff.

	You, sir, are a sick person! :-)

> I don't know about inertia.  If you are perfectly satisfied with what
> you have where is the impetus to change?

	As I said in a previous article, I use troff in preference to TeX.
This is not to say that I like troff better than TeX (although "troff" is
easier to type).  In fact, I hate troff.  More than that, I hate "bib | tbl
| eqn | troff", which I do every day.  It must be even worse if you have to
do "bib | pic | ideal | grap | tbl | eqn | JRandomPreprocessor | troff".

	Why do I hate troff and friends so much (I suppose you could say
"any friend of troff's is no friend of mine")?  Not because it's slow, or
because the output isn't as nice as what TeX produces, but simply because
to get anything fancy done, you have to deal with 4 separate programs (and
2 sets of macros (bib and troff)), all of which interract with each other
in strange ways.  Have you ever seen what happens when you leave a $ out of
an equation inside a table?  Even worse, try leaving an unmatched \fI in a
bib data base.  And don't tell me to use checkeq and checknr to find the
errors; I can show you lots of things that pass unscathed through those and
yet cause troff to have a fit.

	When I was on my way out the door Friday afternoon, somebody came
to me with a tbl problem -- he has a table which works fine when he runs if
off by itself, but when he prints it along with the rest of his manuscript,
he gets pages of ".if 683 < 683" lines printed out.  I've seen that happen
before, and I've fixed it numerous times, but I still don't know what
causes it.  The worst part is that it'll still be there when I get into the
office tommorow morning; one more reason to hate Mondays.

	Don't get me wrong.  I think troff is a wonderful piece of
software.  It's 15 years old and still going strong.  It's been bent and
twisted and stretched into doing things it was never really designed to do
and it somehow manages to keep going.  It's just that more is being
demanded of it than it has to give and it's time to move on to something
else.  Unfortunately, I havn't yet found that something else.  I think TeX
is it, but I'm not yet sure.  As much as I hate troff, I have so much
invested in it (and so do the people I work with) that whatever replaces it
has to be a lot better than troff to justify the cost of learning something
new.
-- 
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016

"you can't spell deoxyribonucleic without unix!"