On Sun, Jul 24, 2022, DJ Chase wrote: > ...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).
Change one word in the last sentence and I could have written both paragraphs myself: "...to eventually *create* MOM." I'm sure I've said it elsewhere, but the truth is, mom came about because of my intense frustration with the state of g/troff documentation in the late 90s: terse, opaque, intimidating, oft-times ambiguous, and supremely geeky. My solution was to write a macro set so clearly documented that users would never have to consult the g/troff documentation at all unless they were themselves macro programmers. Crazy, I know, but when I look at the amount of work Branden has put into improving the official docs, I don't regret the decision one bit. -- Peter Schaffter https://www.schaffter.ca
