On Sep 26, 2016, at 5:25 PM, Paul Vixie <paul(_at_)redbarn(_dot_)org> wrote:
let's boost our outreach to repackagers, find out what they need, and provide
it. there's a win+win in here somewhere.
What stuns me is how people can write thousands of lines of perl to format
documentation, with the justification that learning troff is too hard :-P
In 1986 I dropped a UNIX box and a bunch of terminals into a court reporting
business. Within two months – without any teaching – the supposedly computer
illiterate reporters were writing their own macro packages to typeset court
reports in a format they knew would work much better for the judges and
lawyers, versus anything I had cooked up.
troff's syntax does look a bit like line noise. But what do you expect from
something that tries to stay the hell out of the way of the text it's trying to
set. It is the most consistently regular language I have ever met. And anyone
who discounts it for being opaque or obtuse is just outing themselves as
someone who has never bothered to read the troff user manual.
Osanna was a genius, far ahead of everyone else's time.
--lyndon
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