Re: [Groff] TeX for troff users?

[Blake McBride]

Dear Frank,

In general, perhaps a TeX group would be a better place to ask how to
use TeX.  However, having used both myself, I have to say, Troff/Groff
is so simple and straight forward compared to La/TeX.  LaTeX, on the
other hand, offers the right level of abstraction for books and many
other types of documents.  I have long believed that the bes solution
would be to create a LaTeX like macro package for Groff.  First of all,
it would make writing full-featured, modern documents easy.  Second, it
would make a Groff to LaTeX converter easy.  This way you could do
everything in Groff and then do a quick conversion for your publisher.
This would be my favorite way of working.

Blake McBride

Frank Jahnke wrote:
> I've been using troff for over 25 years (most recently as groff), and I
> still can get nearly any sort of text to jump through hoops.
> Unfortunately, the professional journals do not accept troff source.
> Invariably, they accept Word, WP and TeX, and while I am have OK skills
> with the former two, they really are not up to the sorts of heavy-duty
> tables, math and chemistry that I do in my publications. Besides, Word
> and WP produce truly ugly type. No, many journals won't accept PDF files
> as an original.
>
> To date I have been using a mechanical troff to latex translator, and
> while that works surprisingly well for most of the text, there are many
> things that need fixing. For example, any number registers set in troff
> are lost.
>
> So it is time for me to learn TeX better. Could anyone suggest an
> article or text that is "TeX for troff users?" I don't really want to
> work through the standard texts unless I have to. I know basically how
> TeX works, I would simply like to learn how to use the sorts of things I
> know from troff in a TeX environment.
>
> Any advice would be most appreciated.
>
> Frank
>
>
>
>
>
>