If I can just stick my two cents worth in... On Tue, Feb 21, 2006, Werner LEMBERG wrote: > > Well, at least I've tried :-) I only have one philosophical > > question-mark. When I was a youngster (yes!), device independence > > and pre- and post-processors were good ideas and necessary. I > > wonder whether it still is the case. > > For me: definitely yes.
I concur. > > We, who got used to them, are comfortable with them. I'm not so > > sure about today's youngsters. <snip> > > And perhaps they would like a single application better, a groff > > with built-in tbl, eqn, me or mm etc, producing, say, only ps. This sounds very much like the idea that was fielded a while ago, namely a WYSIWYG-style front-end that generated groff-formatted source documents. I'm not against the idea. I use the lilypond music typesetting system to engrave my scores, but I nearly always start off with one of the graphical front ends to lily to generate a file I can work with. It's a tremendous time saver, being able to see the general outlines of a score before diving into the nitty-gritty. I suspect groff would benefit from something like this--a sort of LyX for groff. And why not have the capability to produce PostScript output as well, if that's what a user wants? However, I noticed that the idea died. Not sure if it was for lack of interest, or lack of skills and time in the development community. > No chance. Youngster don't use groff at all. It's way too uncool, > isn't it? :-) Actually, I'm finding the opposite. I've been asked to give a talk about groff and the mom macro set to the Ottawa/Canada Linux Users Group, which is composed mostly of "youngsters". Conversely, I've noticed that it's people in their forties and fifties, accustomed to word processing, who think the whole text processing philosophy and implementation isn't sufficiently cool for their tastes. As I said, just my two-cents worth. -- Peter Schaffter Author of _The Schumann Proof_ (RendezVous Press, Canada) http://faustus.dyn.ca _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
