🚀 go-pugleaf

Scott Plunkett (plunkett@prcrs.UUCP) writes:
> When the following can be done as easily with a WYSIWYG then troff
> may be retired:
> 
> 	cat <<! | tbl | troff
> 	." version %I%
> 	.
> 	.TS
> 	center, box;
> 	c s s
> 	c c c
> 	l r l.
> 	`pwd`
> 	_
> 	Name	Size	Owner
> 	_
> 	`ls -l | awk '{print $9 "\t" $5 "\t" $3}'`
> 	.TE
> 	!

The conditition could profitably be extended to read:

"When the following can be encapsulated in a shell file and run on demand to
produce the given report without any WYSIWYG fumbling, i.e., the whole
operation of running the report, formatting and printing it can be
accomplished merely by typing one line to the shell (or one menu click from
X11), with *no* on-screen editing, no transformations and 'importing', in
short, no manual intervention, then you may begin to think about retiring
some of the automatic formatters currently in service."

--
Ian Darwin
SoftQuad Inc
ian@sq.com   uunet!sq!ian

-- 
#exclude <stddisclaim.h>