On 2019-11-02 18:29, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
Hi Jordan,
Jordan Geoghegan wrote on Sat, Nov 02, 2019 at 05:44:23PM -0700:
I've thought about learning latex and mandoc and all the fancy
tools, but I've just never gotten around to it.
Actually, both mandoc(1) and mdoc(7) are off-topic in this thread.
You cannot use either for writing a book, neither the mdoc(7)
language nor the mandoc(1) program supports any of the important
features.
Woops, I got pandoc and mandoc confused.
That said, the obvious answer for the OP is of course the
"textproc/groff" port (disclosure: which i maintain). The roff(7)
language and the troff programm is what people in the UNIX world
always used for writing books and journal articles, and it is very
much alive even after the roff language celebrated its 55th birthday
this year. I'm in the habit of using it to prepare slides for
conference talks (with textproc/gpresent), for example, and i'm not
the only only one.
[snip]
As long as you only *use* macro packages, groff is *much*
easier to use than LaTeX (not least because the quality of
documentation of groff is vastly superior to LaTeX, and LaTeX
documentation is so extremely huge and fragmented that it's
a terrible challenge to find anything you need).
[snip]
Most certainly, it is *much* easier to get good typography out
of groff or LaTeX (no matter which one) than out of LibreOffice
or any similar abomination.
Yours,
Ingo
Thanks for the recommendation Ingo, I'm going to test out groff for a
writing project I have coming up.
Cheers,
Jordan
