*roff and page layout ? (Re: Tools for writers)

> the "print/texlive" port is how ridiculously large it is.

because it comes with the whole distribution. i never tested but
https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/ seems to fix it by downloading
stuff on demand. however, another problem with tex is performance.
troff is blazing fast. however...

> "textproc/groff" port (disclosure: which i maintain). The roff(7)
> The "textproc/heirloom-doctools" port is a serious contender for a
...

i tried nroff long time ago so i tried to create templates for memos and
letters with layouts where:

A is company logo and info
B is for metainfo about the current letter
C is the actual body

┌─────┐┌─────┐
│A ││B │
└─────┘└─────┘
┌────────────┐
│ C │
└────────────┘

┌─┐┌─────┐
│A││C │
│B││ │
│ ││ │
│ ││ │
└─┘└─────┘

i tried both of those (you can achieve this with latex minipages) but i
never made it work so i gave out.

did i miss a fine didactic documentation about it ?

regards
marc

ps: i think it was the plan9 troff,

> 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).

well ... i have to admit i tried harder with LaTeX but thanks to
CTAN, i reached the point when i know what are the classes and packages
i need (mostly article, book, beamer and tikz).

there is no CTAN for troff and that's a missing part.

> out LaTeX is easier to program than roff(7) because the syntax and
> semantics of the low-level roff(7) language are, let's put it
> politely, quite unusual and surprising in many details.

i love the way you're saying that. is there a document to dive into it ?

> groff, and besides, i did implement considerable parts of the roff
> language in /usr/src/usr.bin/mandoc/roff.c.

nice. thank you for mandoc!

regards
marc