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I love this hint
Authored by: gshenaut on Oct 24, '05 09:03:27AM
As someone who has been using *roff since about 1976 (first roff, under V6 UNIX, then nroff/troff, then ditroff, then MKS/SoftQuad sqroff, then groff under BSDI and FreeBSD and now under MacOS/X), it warms my heart to see that the program continues to live on and have value.

One of the most useful features in the *roff family is the set of filters that exist for it. These are aimed at tables (tbl), equations (eqn), figures (pic), graphs (grap), and references (refer). There are also macro packages that may have value to some other than -mom and -man, such as -ms, which is probably the oldest, widely-used package, and -me, which was designed for typesetting dissertations. Finally, for those who are inclined towards programming, it can be very useful to use make(1) to manage all the pieces, filtering, and transformations in a longer groff document.

There are weaknesses with *roff in today's environment, chiefly the fact that it doesn't directly support output formats that are currently portable, such as .rtf and .pdf (you can get to .pdf from .ps as in the hint and also in various other ways, but the current .rtf translators are unacceptable). The problem is that some journals require either .doc or .rtf for manuscripts. However, there are other output formats that are supported, see groff(1).

Greg Shenaut

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