On Thursday, 20 October 2005 at 15:07:32 -0400, Zvezdan Petkovic wrote: > On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 10:51:45PM -0600, D. E. Evans wrote: >> groff is now a major component in a majority (I would think) of >> UNIX systems, and UNIX variants. It is used for online manuals, >> and print manuals; it is used for writing documentation, memos, >> letters, and so on. > > I don't agree with this assessment. > > Take a look at O'Reilly books (colophon section). Until recently > they all were converted from format X into groff and printed.
Has this changed? A while back I looked at their conversion software and ported it to FreeBSD (/usr/ports/textproc/gmat). Unfortunately, it's probably no longer buildable; there are some strange kludges in there, and once I no longer had to use it, I didn't. > Take a look at books written by W. R. Stevens. Even the updated > editions after his death are done by the new co-authors in groff. My books are also written in groff. > I think that limiting groff to "documentation, memos, letters, and > manuals" is not right. I didn't see a limitation above. But I think it's fair to say that the majority of books are *not* written in groff. Even the O'Reilly books are usually written in XML DocBook and converted to groff; this process is painful enough that I gave up on it. A more interesting question is: can you point to a book written in groff (not just converted to and formatted by groff) with serious layout problems? Greg -- Finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
