Thank you, Jim for this overview on roff - groff.
And, by the way, if someone is about music typesetting, check out
http://lilypond.org/ which is kind-of-similar to *roff but for music.
The score can be written as code on FreeDOS with any text editor ;-)
-Thomas
> On Sat,20210501- week17, at 23:00, Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote:
>
>> On 4/25/2021 10:43 PM, TK Chia wrote:
> [..]
>>> troff (as groff) is still very much alive today, as far as I can tell.
>>> And the troff format is still the default source format for man pages on
>>> Linux. It is quite a good format for the job, if you ask me.
>
> On Mon, Apr 26, 2021 at 1:54 AM Ralf Quint <freedos...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Well, it all depends on what you are used to. I haven't used any of that
>> troff (etc) stuff in +30 years now, ever since GUI deskops and apps for
>> it started to become usable.
> [..]
>
> BTW, if anyone is interested in troff (or variants) there's an
> interesting history in Brian Kernighan's book, "Unix: A History and a
> Memoir." It starts on page 98. In brief:
>
> Jerry Saltzer's Runoff program was an early text formatting system,
> originally for CTSS. It used macros like this:
>
> .ce
> This is a centered (ce) line.
> .ti 5
> This line has a starting text indent (ti) of 5 spaces.
>
>
> While at MIT, Kernighan wrote a simple implementation of Runoff called
> Roff ("an abbreviated Runoff")
>
> Joe Ossanna at Bell Labs (Unix team) later wrote a similar but more
> powerful implementation called Nroff (for "New Roff") that generated
> output suitable for the typewriter-like printers at the time
>
> When the Unix team acquired a phototypesetting machine, Joe made
> significant updates to Nroff to create Troff (for "Typesetter Roff")
> to drive the typesetter
>
> Kernighan later updated Troff to become the Device Independent Troff
> (still called "Troff" but I've also seen this referenced as "ditroff")
> with a typesetter description language that allowed Troff to produce
> output for different kinds of devices
>
> And much later, GNU wrote a new implementation called Groff ("GNU Roff")
>
>
> I've written a few articles for OpenSource.com about using groff. The
> latest one is here:
> https://opensource.com/article/21/4/groff-programmer
>
> (It even includes a groff source file using the "-me" macros)
>
>
> At the time, writing documents in nroff/troff/groff was as common as
> writing documentation in Markdown today.
>
>
> Jim
>
>
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