On 15-Mar-03 Alexis Lee wrote:
On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 07:28:28PM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
-- it covers the use of Unix troff and friends, and the use
Thanks for this Ted.
If people are looking at text-based document formatting systems, LaTeX is usually considered superior to troff &c. For print only of course.
Particular strengths are *really* nice equation formatting, automatic table of contents generation and automatic bibliography generation.
A fair, but arguable, comment! Granted: TeX/LaTeX has the benefit of coming later on the scene; has more typesetting wisdom built in (Knuth being a guru on that as well as other things); does usually produce nicer-looking output, espcially for mathematics.
However, much of its "nice-looking equations" is due to the great variety of well-designed fonts and special symbols which Knuth had the wisdom to create. Now that these are available as PostScript font definitions, which can be installed in groff as well, this advantage is not intrinsic to TeX. Indeed, given any printed output from TeX, you could in principle exactly duplicate in in groff (since this permits you to place any mark whatever, so long as you can define it to the program, anywhere on a page), and in practice reproduce it at least very closely if not identically.
The equation formatting from troff/groff is also very good, and can be tweaked for better effect if you wish. The main difference in most practice, as noted above, lies in the fonts used.
There are features where I would back troff/groff to produce better output, for the same effort, than TeX (though again, since TeX can be "programmed" by the user, in theory it too could do the same).
Automatic ToC, indexing, and bibliography gerenation are equally within the scope of troff/groff (though best results are obtained by using non-groff auxiliary programs such as Tim Budd's 'bib' and, for indexing, ironically the TeX utility 'makeindex' which can eqwually well be set up for troff/groff). For ToC, the best method involves a simple 'awk' script (see the source tarball for "Unix Text Processing" whose URL I gace previously).
In terms of capability, therefore, I would not rank TeX as generally better than groff. On the other hand, it is a fact of life that in the academic and technical authoring world, TeX is far more widely used. This is largely because it was adopted with enthusiasm when it first became generally available around 1990, resulting in development of good "wrappers" such as LaTeX and the writing of much excellent documentation; at that time, troff was still hard to use and sparsely documnted. So it is the "industry standard", if you like, espcially for document exchange in that world. You would be cutting yourself off if you worked in that world and did not want to have anything to do with TeX.
On the other hand, as a certain widely used word processor exemplifies, being the "industry standard" which "everyone" uses and which you have to use youself if you are to have dealings with them, is not of itself an argument for the _quality_ of that software. Not that I'm hinting that the quality of TeX can be measured by the quality of that other thing -- quite the contrary!
Best wishes, Ted.
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