On Sat Jul 23, 2022 at 10:08 PM EDT, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > At 2022-07-23T18:30:22-0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > > Sadly, almost all of the papers were submitted in LaTex. I think the > > reasons were > > (b) troff was locked up and the docs were locked for a long time. > > I don't think the lack of availability of troff source mattered much > since groff had been out for 10 years by then, but the lack of > documentation surely did. I don't think Trent Fisher contributed the > first cut of our Texinfo manual for another few years, and creating > replacements for the original CSRC ms papers documenting various aspects > of the system is a project that remains underway (hence why I went > looking for Ted Harding recently).
I’ve never read the Texinfo manual; I learned *roff through Unix For People,[1] then various online materials maybe half a year ago. The turn-off for me was how cryptic all of the troff examples (from any source) I saw were, and how it felt like I was always fighting the typesetter to get it to do even basic things. If not for my strangely-intense desire to do things ‘the Unix way’, I would not have continued with troff to eventually find MOM (which I now love). [1]: https://archive.org/details/unixforpeoplemod00birn Cheers, -- DJ Chase They, Them, Theirs
