@mos_8502 Probably because (even 😏) tex is more readable (and, of course, more verbose) 😉
The only thing that still forces you to use (a limited subset of) #roff (with some macro package) is authoring manpages that should work "everywhere" (read, systems without #mandoc support) 😉
Of course, still an interesting thing to cover. I guess "power users" (having to typeset stuff a lot) would actually like the pretty terse syntax.
a66ey 🇪🇺🏳️🌈 she/her
Felix Palmen 📯
www-gem
Matěj Cepl 🇪🇺 🇨🇿 🇺🇦
postmodern
postmodern<i> </i> tags, instead of underlining them (which would be more visually accurate, imo).@ju Goes for #roff or #troff as well, even BWK recommended this back then:
> Most documents go through several versions (always more than you expected) before they are finally finished. Accordingly, you should do whatever possible to make the job of changing them easy.
>
> First, when you do the purely mechanical operations of typing, type so subsequent editing will be easy. Start each sentence on a new line. Make lines short, and break lines at natural places, such as after commas and semicolons, rather than randomly. Since most people change documents by rewriting phrases and adding, deleting and rearranging sentences, these precautions simplify any editing you have to do later.
This has even recently been rediscovered by Brandon Rhodes and Mattt culminating sembr.org.
I've prepared basically all my docs since I started LaTeX in 9th class like this. Such a life saver.
This is actually the problem that led me to porting cawf to RISC OS in the first place. I thought I could just pull file.1 from the source, run it through a local nroff, and be done
but there doesnt seem to be a modern-ish *roff ported to 32bit RISC OS... (hence cawf)
and file.1 has to be built anyway...
and even after i got a file.1 cawf can't handle the newer -man or -mdoc macros it uses anyway! (i forget which its wrtiien in)
DJ-Bauer
LisPi
lj·rk
Willard Goosey