Re: [Groff] Draft paper: "Writing Effective Manual Pages"

[Pete Phillips]

>>>>> "Gour" == Gour  <address@hidden> writes:
    Gour> And what about the quality of groff for paper output?
    Gour> Is is comparable to TeX?

IMHO, good TeX can produce beautiful pages not matched by troff. That's
probably down to Knuth's obsession with typography. These days I use
LyX/TeX/LaTeX (did I get all the capitalisations right ?) for report
writing and groff for our lab documentation (quality manual, SOP's, test
methods, and routine reports).

The main reason is that if I need to something in particular, there is
nearly always a LaTeX package available to do the job without me having
to write a macro package (writing troff macros was not fun, even when
the extended syntax came out where you could use variables longer than
two characters!). Also I can just give LyX to UNIX newbies and it is
close enough to what they are familiar with to produce good looking
reports, but I can still go in with vi/emacs and edit the raw latex as
well.  In addition, citation support is excellent (using something like
pybliographer) as is cross referencing (we have to use the lbl package
to get useable cross referencing in troff, and citation support is a bit
clunky).

    Gour> I'm total groff newbie but saw Ted's post regards; TeX buffers
    Gour> more input and therefore auto-produces 'better' layout than
    Gour> groff.

    Gour> How much tweaking is needed to achieve the same quality of
    Gour> output?

    Gour> Is is possible to match TeX quality because of the different
    Gour> approach?

It would take too much work to get troff looking like TeX in my opinion,
and frankly why bother.  Horses for courses.  Groff is superb for
automated production of reports and tables, or where you need to hack up
a quick doc in vi or emacs, or where you have a legacy requirement (like
us with close to 20 years of lab reports and docs in troff format).  It
is an excellent example of the UNIX mantra "one tool for one job" - you
can build quite complex typesetting pipelines of processing commands.

We don't use groff for its beauty (although the test reports do look
really good IMHO - I still haven't been able to get LyX/LaTeX to produce
an acceptable test report to match troff).

The other good thing about troff is that nobody gets prissie about its
capitalisation!  ;-) 

Pete