LaTeX is not going anywhere, but for 90% of everyday typeset doc creation (letters, articles, etc) - groff / troff is often a superior choice.
Its included in nearly every *nix system and generally syntax is much easier to handle (a doc with no syntax embedded still produces reasonable results).
Notwithstanding the wonderful 'mom' package, its shame development has seemed to dry up.
LaTeX is not going anywhere, but for 90% of everyday typeset doc creation (letters, articles, etc) - groff / troff is often a superior choice.
I had my troff phase, but I don't see why I'd want to write troff directly for simpler documents if I can just write in org-mode or Markdown and convert it to a myriad of formats (including LaTeX and HTML). With org-mode I can also run inline code snippets, feed tables directly to gnuplot, use org-mode's todo/agenda functionality, etc.
A tex document with no "syntax" embedded also produces reasonable results.
For simple projects I do not even write tex code directly. I write in org-mode and export. So I wouldn't be opposed to using groff for typesetting if it produced high quality output.
But whenever I'm preparing for publication I always end up manually tweaking many things for latex. There are a lot of things TeX does automatically perfectly well. Typesetting paragraphs is one of them. But overall page layout always requires manual work in my experience. Does groff make this manual work easier?
I think that the more markup you have to insert, the value is left in working with latex. It's a big uphill climb until you have a usable template, I guess.
Agreed. The benefit of troff system is: (a) If you only need to add minimal markup (occasional .PP .B .I), (b) the fact its everywhere, (c) because of "A", no IDE / Editor needed
That is to say, for minimal jobs its great - if you need to extend effort go LaTeX
Comments
LaTeX is not going anywhere, but for 90% of everyday typeset doc creation (letters, articles, etc) - groff / troff is often a superior choice.
Its included in nearly every *nix system and generally syntax is much easier to handle (a doc with no syntax embedded still produces reasonable results).
Notwithstanding the wonderful 'mom' package, its shame development has seemed to dry up.
LaTeX is not going anywhere, but for 90% of everyday typeset doc creation (letters, articles, etc) - groff / troff is often a superior choice.
I had my troff phase, but I don't see why I'd want to write troff directly for simpler documents if I can just write in org-mode or Markdown and convert it to a myriad of formats (including LaTeX and HTML). With org-mode I can also run inline code snippets, feed tables directly to gnuplot, use org-mode's todo/agenda functionality, etc.
A tex document with no "syntax" embedded also produces reasonable results.
For simple projects I do not even write tex code directly. I write in org-mode and export. So I wouldn't be opposed to using groff for typesetting if it produced high quality output.
But whenever I'm preparing for publication I always end up manually tweaking many things for latex. There are a lot of things TeX does automatically perfectly well. Typesetting paragraphs is one of them. But overall page layout always requires manual work in my experience. Does groff make this manual work easier?
I think that the more markup you have to insert, the value is left in working with latex. It's a big uphill climb until you have a usable template, I guess.
Agreed. The benefit of troff system is: (a) If you only need to add minimal markup (occasional .PP .B .I), (b) the fact its everywhere, (c) because of "A", no IDE / Editor needed
That is to say, for minimal jobs its great - if you need to extend effort go LaTeX