Re: [Groff] Questions about groff

[Werner LEMBERG]

>   1. I've read that troff should be pronounced "tee-roff", but I
>      haven't seen anywhere how groff should be pronounced.  Is the
>      correct pronunciation "jee-roff", or should it be pronounced
>      as it's spelled, with one syllable and a hard g?

The logical extension is jee-roff.  I don't care.

>   2. What is the difference between groff and TeX/LaTeX?  Are they
>      just two tools to do the same job, like the difference between
>      vi and emacs, each with its own supporters, or are there some
>      applications where groff is more suitable and others where
>      TeX/LaTeX would be a better choice?

Basically they can do the same.  TeX has better paragraph formatting
capabilities.  groff supports direct TTY output, TeX doesn't.  TeX's
macro capabilities are more sophisticated.  TeX has no bugs, groff
has :-) CJK support within plain LaTeX is possible (albeit sometimes a
pain), groff can't.  Some input characters are reserved in groff (I
consider this the greatest drawback currently), TeX can use all 256
charcodes.

My conclusion: If you want documents be available for both plain text
and other formats like dvi or ps, groff is probably the better choice.
The only alternative is the texinfo package, but this has different
goals, and the typesetting capabilities are very restricted
(intentionally).

>   3. I have been unable to find a description of each of the popular
>      macro packages, and what they are designed for.  I assume each
>      has a particular type of document it was designed to create,
>      such as letters, books, scientific papers, etc.  I know that
>      the man and mdoc macros are for man pages (although I'm not
>      sure I'm clear on the differences between the two), but what
>      the mm, ms, and me macros?

man is probably the simplest macro package.  mdoc is very
sophisticated (and slow), trying to do text markup.  As you correctly
say, both are intended for manual pages.  ms, mm, and me do the same
but have different concepts (this wording is very superficial, of
course).  Their targets is rather non-TTY than TTY output.

>   4. I have a Hewlett Packard Deskjet 870Cse printer.  When I tried
>      to print documents using the -Tlj4 option, the printing was
>      incorrect.  In particular, right justification didn't work, and
>      the ligatures were all wrong.  I assume this has to do with
>      incompatibilities between the Deskjet 870Cse and the LaserJet 4
>      built-in fonts and the fact that the lj4 device description
>      file and font files were created for the latter.  Is there a
>      source for these files for other printers, or alternatively, a
>      way to create them easily?

You should try HP's web pages (or ftp server) to search for metric
files.  Here the location of the LJ4 metric files:

  ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/faxes/software/tfmlj4p.exe

An alternative is to produce PS output and print it with
ghostscript.  Of course, this doesn't support built-in fonts.

Since I don't know the PCL language, I would be glad if someone could
add colour support to grolj4.  On the other hand, I don't know whether
it is worth to do that: There are so many printers on the market, each
having different built-in fonts; all printers would need new devXXX
subdirectories for the metric files.  A lost battle, I think.

>   5. Is it possible to create graphs with groff?  I've heard of a
>      preprocessor called grap, but where is it available?  I prefer
>      using text-based programs, and I've been using the public
>      domain spreadsheet program, sc, and would like to be able to
>      convert some of my spreadsheet data to graphs.

As written in MORE.STUFF, grap is available from

  http://www.lunabase.org/~faber/Vault/software/grap/

>   6. I work for a small family-owned retail business, and the primary
>      applications I'm interested in at the moment are the following:
> 
>         * Making signs, either one to a page, or four to a page, on
>           commercially available perforated card stock, with borders.
>           This would require the ability to print in some relatively
>           large fonts, possibly 72 points or so, and most of them
>           would require landscape mode.  We also need to print peel
>           and stick labels for labeling jars and bottles.  It would
>           be nice to be able to also use some of the fonts available
>           to some of the graphical spreadsheets and word processors,
>           including those that come with MS Windows for Excel, etc.,
>           as we are now using Excel for some of this, and I'm trying
>           to eliminate Windows completely to avoid having to reboot
>           for these jobs.  Can this be done?

Basically yes.  Get pfaedit and convert the TrueType fonts to Type 1
fonts.  The only problem is that most TTFs have more than 256 glyphs
in it, making it non-trivial to find a proper mapping.  On the other
hand, big-sized fonts will be printed in the same quality as if the
TTFs were used.

>         * Writing letters.  We don't do many letters, but it would
>           be nice, and I would think that this is probably one of
>           the more common uses for groff.

Maybe others can comment on this.

>         * I would like to be able to create a professional looking
>           employee manual, probably two columns in landscape mode,
>           to be folded in half and stapled at the fold.

This is definitely possible.

>      Would any of the available macro packages be suitable for any
>      of of the above, and if not, how difficult would it be to
>      create my own macros?  Where can I find documentation on how to
>      create macros?

Writing groff macros is very easy, even easier as with TeX IMHO.  I
suggest to take a simple macro file like an-old.tmac as a starting
point to analyze how macros can be written.  The man macros are
completely documented in groff_man.1, and the source code is quite
readable since long names are used.


    Werner