Re: Tools for writers

On 2019-11-02 18:29, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Hi Jordan,
>
> Jordan Geoghegan wrote on Sat, Nov 02, 2019 at 05:44:23PM -0700:
>
>> I've thought about learning latex and mandoc and all the fancy
>> tools, but I've just never gotten around to it.
> Actually, both mandoc(1) and mdoc(7) are off-topic in this thread.
> You cannot use either for writing a book, neither the mdoc(7)
> language nor the mandoc(1) program supports any of the important
> features.
Woops, I got pandoc and mandoc confused.
> That said, the obvious answer for the OP is of course the
> "textproc/groff" port (disclosure: which i maintain). The roff(7)
> language and the troff programm is what people in the UNIX world
> always used for writing books and journal articles, and it is very
> much alive even after the roff language celebrated its 55th birthday
> this year. I'm in the habit of using it to prepare slides for
> conference talks (with textproc/gpresent), for example, and i'm not
> the only only one.
>
> [snip]
>
> As long as you only *use* macro packages, groff is *much*
> easier to use than LaTeX (not least because the quality of
> documentation of groff is vastly superior to LaTeX, and LaTeX
> documentation is so extremely huge and fragmented that it's
> a terrible challenge to find anything you need).
>
> [snip]
>
> Most certainly, it is *much* easier to get good typography out
> of groff or LaTeX (no matter which one) than out of LibreOffice
> or any similar abomination.
>
> Yours,
> Ingo

Thanks for the recommendation Ingo, I'm going to test out groff for a
writing project I have coming up.

Cheers,

Jordan