Article: 151106 de comp.text.tex Path: loria.fr!news-rocq.inria.fr!jussieu.fr!enst!isdnet!newsfeed.cwix.com!192.26.210.166!sunqbc.risq.qc.ca!gatech!nntp-xfer.ncsu.edu!seedlab1.cropsci.ncsu.edu!rdkeys From: "User Rdkeys Robert D. Keys" Newsgroups: comp.text.tex Subject: Re: LaTeX vs. troff Date: 5 Jan 1999 17:50:05 GMT Organization: North Carolina State University Lines: 119 Message-ID: <76tjcd$875$1@uni00nw.unity.ncsu.edu> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: seedlab1.cropsci.ncsu.edu Cc: rdkeys User-Agent: tin/pre-1.4-980202 (UNIX) (FreeBSD/3.0-980523-SNAP (i386)) Xref: loria.fr comp.text.tex:151106 David Guertin wrote: > Hi folks, Hello.... > I've agreed to help out with authoring a book, and a question has > arisen about writing the book in troff vs. LaTeX. I'm hoping for > LaTeX, because it's what I'm familiar with, but the final decision is > up to the senior author, who is a troff guy. Sounds like a worthy project..... Interesting cross. If you are starting from scratch, probably TeX or LaTeX is best. If you are starting with a pre-existing boiler-plate, it sounds like it will be troff, so run with that if the lead author is comfy with it, and has the tools at hand to make it work, since it will be less hassle to get it together, and he can guide you along. > This will be a fairly long, multi-chapter book, with lots of sections > and figures. Is there a troff/LaTeX converter that is reliable enough > to allow him to work in troff and me in LaTeX, or is that just wishful > thinking on my part? Troff or TeX/LaTeX will do both. It just depends on how you approach doing it, that will make the big difference. If you are doing it in troff, you have to think like a troffer. If you are doing it in TeX you have to think like a TeXie. If you are doing it in LaTeX, the thinking is mostly done for you. ln converters, there really is not anything good, IMHO. Some things make a fair pass, but it never is good enough, and the few I have tried have been more pain than gain. Usually I choose one formatter and run with it for a single document or series of documents after assessing what the particular needs are. You have to know what you are after ahead of time, and decide whether troff or TeX/LaTeX will do that well or easily or to your liking or to your pre-existing comfort level. > Barring that, and being completely ignorant of troff (other than > reading tons of man pages over the years...), do I have a convincing > argument that LaTeX is actually a better authoring tool than troff? > Will troff do most of the same basic things (w.r.t floats, section > numbers, figures, etc.) as LaTeX? It depends. Troff will do everything LaTeX will do, but requires a little more writing native to troff. LaTeX is a little more idiot proof. Plain TeX is more like writing in native troff. LaTeX is more like writing in troff with the mm macros, for example. The analogy is rather similar, in principle. In practice, if LaTeX will do it for you, it is probably a better bet. I reprint old radio related literature in both troff and TeX. If it is a book style I want, I usually run plain TeX. I have used LaTeX for conference proceedings and it works relatively well at that, but it has limits that require you to coerce it some times. If it is a military manual of some type, or other historical document, I usually use troff, with my own minimal macro set, or TeX, since I am most comfy with that. If it is a really canned book, I often use LaTeX. Like I said, it depends. Troff is easy to learn, if all you are doing is a canned style of book. It can be problematic if you are not following canning rules. It will often require you to pick up widows and orphans or slightly restructure, editorially, a page to make it ``fit'' to your liking, more often than TeX, and usually more often than LaTeX. It is infinitely less verbose than TeX/LaTeX. It is less forgiving of minor syntactical errors, and more prone to strangely blow up. Footer spacing to pagination is always a minor problem to fill properly. Noone's macro set does it exactly right all the time. Tex is generally better at handling these types of things, if you think low level in the markup. It is very similar to troff in this respect. It handles most things like spacing, pagination, and line breaks, mostly better than troff, in looking at the two outputs side by side. Both are always better than in my hands than that other stuff from out in the Wild West, IMHO, and I chuckle at what our secretaries are constrained with, since they don't use troff or TeX/LaTeX, and curse the day they do biggie documents or books WYSIWYG mode. I always chuckle at that since the old familiar troff or TeX/LaTeX suites easily handle it in stride, and look way better, every time. If you are doing the writing, remember to find an editing system that is plain ascii and stay away from any WYSIWYG editor, if you value your or your secretary's time. Such editors can often include things you did not want to include, like binary junk, and often will try to do things in still another ``their own way''. LaTeX is OK IFF it will do it the way it wants to do it, and that is OK for you. Else, use plain TeX. Trying to coerce LaTeX to put things where YOU want it can sometimes be a real bear, since it usually wants to do it ITS way, instead. On the other hand, if you are following canned formats, LaTeX is usually always easier to get it acceptably right. The trick in LaTeX is to develop a boiler-plate document first, and then work that up to suit, and then work your chapters, etc., into it. It saves lots of headache and time, later. The question is, how canned is the output you can tolerate? If it is being troffed, my guess is that there will be a roughly equivalent LaTeX style that will work. But, it won't be the same. If you have a similar pattern work that is available in TeX/LaTeX with a canned boiler-plate, use that, for simplicity, so you don't have to re-invent the wheel. > Cheers, > -- > Dave "did I just precipitate a holy war?" Guertin > guertin@middlebury.edu Nah, we troffer/TeXies have reached Nirvana, and have long ago left the holy wars to others.....(:+}}.... Good Luck, and if you are starting from scratch, give a bias to TeX/LaTeX unless you or your co-author are troffers from way back. If he is only a lighter troffer, it could be a problem. It he is an old hand at troff, then you should not have any major problems, and he should pass you a few sample markups for study, so you can get the gist of what it is doing. Manpage experience won't help much in doing a good job with troff --- it usually takes more than that. TeX is a little easier. LaTeX is usually much easier if it will do what you want it to do. RDK