#troff — Public Fediverse posts

Neben alten Computern hab' ich's ja auch mit Typographie, Buchdruck und Fotosatz. Von da ist es dann nicht mehr weit zu Textsatz mit dem Computer und der Welt von troff, pic und eqn. Dazu heute zwei Neuzugänge im Alteisenregal. #vintagecomputing #bücherliebe #unix #techhistory #dtp #troff

I guess I’m doing something of a competition between #Emacs #orgmode export to #LaTeX and lovingly hand-crafted #heirloom #doctools #troff (-me).
I briefly considered an export from #orgmode to #groff (-ms) via #pandoc to see if the two approaches could possibly share anything, but that may be a gulf that is not worth crossing.

One of the macros I had coded up was to present something as a link to its entry in the appendix the first time it appeared on a new page, and ordinary text without link for subsequent mentions on the same page. While I’m sure there is a way to do this in the #TeX universe, I don’t know (yet) if it is considered sufficiently within the #LaTeX mindset to be worth attempting.

Building up from physical to logical to semantic markup feels more natural in #troff. Reaching down from #LaTeX into #TeX to perform computation in your document feels discouraged, doubly so when exporting from #orgmode. It is a wonderful method for planning, organizing, and ultimately creating a beautiful document from a single source file.

Different people want different things out of their typesetting systems. I’m glad to have spent some time in both the #troff and #TeX worlds.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m reasonably proud of what I have accomplished with #heirloom #doctools (a.k.a. #troff that is not #groff) and I even learned a few neat #makefile tricks along the way. But given how much time I spend with #emacs and #orgmode perhaps I should seriously investigate duplicating or imitating the work in #LaTeX. It did not take as long as I feared it would to get the color and font matters worked out. The #macros look like they will translate easily enough, with some support from #elisp. Links and bookmarks look like they will work themselves out. Pictures could be…interesting.

My poll about *nix typesetting systems ended today and I published on my Phlog my thoughts about it:

gopher://sdf.org/0/users/syntaxerror/phlog/2024-09-05-Typesetting-Systems-Currently-In-Use.txt

#troff #unix #nix #latex #linux #bsd #gopher #phlog