🚀 go-pugleaf

I normally would have replied via email, but this one rankles me
just a tad, so what the hell...

In article <112@tg.UUCP> scott@tg.UUCP (Scott Barman) writes:
>In article <505@geac.UUCP> david@geac.UUCP (David Haynes) writes:
>>
>>In a word, DRIVERS.
>>
>>I have been trying for over a year now to obtain a
>>ditroff driver for our LN03 laser. Guess what?
>>Nobody's got one! So I take a look at TeX -- an
>>LN03 driver right on the distribution tape! WOW.
>The machine I am now using (and have done some consulting work for) has
>an LN03 and LN03-Plus and they use ditroff to output to it.  I don't think
>you've looked too hard either.

Harder than you think laddie.

>                                Open "Unix/World" or "Unix Review" and
>check out the ads for ditroff stuff since I think I've seen a couple
>of folks advertise they have it!  I think SoftQuaid of Toronto, Canada
>has it.

What SoftQuad has is good vapurware. I have had an outstanding purchase
order against their LN03 driver and ditroff stuff for over four months
now.

>         Besides, if you have WWB or DWB source,
>drivers are not difficult to write, just use an existing one as a guide...
>that's what I did!

And guess what? SoftQuad is the sole distributor of DWB in Canada.
Think they are going to sell me DWB without the LN03 driver which
doesn't exist?

>
>>A number of people have been stating that troff
>>comes with UNIX. This may be true (although some
>>vendors charge extra for the stuff) but how many
>>people have the equipment to use the standard
>>drivers supplied with troff? How many people have
>>not hit at lease one major troff stupidity?
>I just finished a driver for a VideoComp 500 phototypesetter for two different
>emulations and both programs compile well under 100K on a VAX.  The Imagen
>driver (which I had to hack for the environment) handles both host resident
>and printer resident fonts and is under 150K.  The font description files
>for each in source and compiled form takes up negligable amounts of space.

So your solution to everyone who wants ditroff is to write a driver for
it? Why should I do this, when I can get the LN03 dvi driver for free?
How do you cost-justify that? Can you say "business sense"? I knew you could!

>The disk hogs are the Computer Modern raster files for the Imagen.
>Also, how many people can find a TeX stupidity?  There are enough, just read
>this news group.
>
>>With TeX, I get full source, documentation, a driver
>>for our laser, LaTeX, BibTeX, SliTeX and a host of
>>public-domain software - for free! I can buy previewers
>>for IBM and Macintosh devices and can even subscribe
>>to a newletter to tell me more. If a real problem
>>arises, I can even contact Richard Furuta or Donald Knuth.
>And, if you buy DWB from AT&T you can call them, or querry this news group!

AT&T Canada wouldn't know ditroff if it came up and bit them!
AT&T Stateside will help me if they can show me a legally registered
as owning DWB. I can't get DWB, if I did, the registration would be 
in Canada, and AT&T stateside would not help me. 

(For those who disbelieve - I recently wanted to attend a course on
UNIX internals in San Fransisco. I spent four f**king days talking
to AT&T Canada, AT&T stateside, the vendours of the course and 
various other people trying to get them all to agree that I owned
a System V source license and could, therefore, attend the course.
The entire problem focussed around the problem that AT&T stateside
did not have a copy of my license registered in the states.)

>
>>Try to find anyone who knows Troff that well.
>I am available! :-)
>
Oh really? Want a standard troff package that will blow your
ditroff to hell? What to tell me how to fix it. It worked
fine with the original Troff - core dumps now!
>
>>-david-
>
>Scott Barman
>{philabs, pyrnj}!tg!scott

Whew! I guess what really steamed me about this is a) it was *incredibly*
condescending and b) Scott assumes that all the world in the United States.
Now, some of you might like to believe that :-) but the rest of us have
to live in the real world. 

For the record, I do not believe that the sun shines out of TeX's *ss, but
I do not believe that troff (or ditroff) is a viable alternative. And, I
think that, given time and the amount of development effort that is going
into TeX, that the eventual winner of the race will be TeX.

-david-
(From the land of the frozen north)
-- 
==========================================================================
David Haynes					(utzoo!yetti!geac!david)
Geac Computers International Inc.		+1 416 475 0525 x 3420
350 Steelcase Road,Markham, Ontario,  CANADA, L3R 1B3