🚀 go-pugleaf

Re:  Troff is great; look at all the books written in troff.

I believe a revolution is coming, and troff will be the first against
the wall (to be sacrificed).

Troff will die because of the t in it's name -- "Typesetter".
Typesetters are being replaced by laserprinters, which do a lot more.
Take a look at the output language of ditroff sometime.  Here are the
only graphics objects in the language:

  lines, thick lines (berkeley), circles, arcs, ellipses, and splines.
  characters, fonts, font sizes.

Ask yourself, 

(1) How do I shade objects with different patterns or continuous halftones?
(2) How do I draw thick objects in general?
(3) How do I label the y axis of a graph, using 90-degree rotated words?
(4) How would I label the arcs in a network flow graph with rotated letters?
(5) How would I draw a black box and then etch characters into it (in
    reverse video?)
(6) How do I include halftone / binary / floyded images?
(7) How do I superimpose graphics objects on top of each other?

The macintosh (and postscript) have all these abilities.  Troff has
none.  All you need is a program to create these quickdraw/postscript
images, and then you may paste them into your favorite WYSWYG word
processor (mine is MS-Word, but Writenow, Fullwrite, Wordperfect, or
Macwrite work equally well), and print them out at full postscript
(300+ dpi) resolution.  Face it, troff is an elephant, which deserves
respect, a gold watch, and retirement very soon.

Troff is also missing some formatting niceties, such as the ability to
wrap text around a picture, or lay out pages like PageMaker or other
page layout programs.

About the only thing troff does better than these word processors is
typeset mathematics.  MS-Word typesets mathematics in an ugly fashion.
I have talked to some people at microsoft, and they are considering
improving MS-Word mathematics in Macintosh Word 5.0.  Most other
macintosh word processors do no math at all, but you can "draw"
equations with one of a half-dozen equation-formatting desk
accessories and paste them in.  Some of these do an excellent job.

I believe TeX will survive longer because its equation-formatting and
word-spacing ability is unparalleled.  But it will eventually succomb
to the WYSWYG revolution, or its equations will be incorporated into a
WYSWYG editor.

If you want to have "a text stream I can ftp to my friends", then you
should think about postscript.  Postscript makes a great archival
medium, as long as you treat the postscript file like a piece of
immutable preprinted paper.  Why not mail that friend a postscript
master, and he can print it out on most of the laser printers in the
country.


Don Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801      
ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP: {uunet,harvard}!uiucdcs!gillies