Date: Tue, 4 Jun 1996 19:26:27 -0600 From: Sean Kelly <kelly@fsl.noaa.gov> To: peter@taronga.com Cc: doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: How do I write this SGML stuff? Message-ID: <199606050126.BAA11608@gatekeeper.fsl.noaa.gov> In-Reply-To: <199606050020.TAA18778@bonkers.taronga.com> (peter@taronga.com)
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>>>>> "Peter" == Peter da Silva <peter@taronga.com> writes:
Peter> In article <199606042153.VAA10567@gatekeeper.fsl.noaa.gov>
Peter> you write:
>> Given that we already can go to LaTeX which can go to
>> professionally typeset documents, why do we need to also go to
>> troff which can go to professionally typeset documents?
Peter> Because TeX is soggy and hard to light,
and troff doesn't stay crispy in milk. The score: 0 to 0.
Peter> producing huge amounts of gibberish output in which real
Peter> error messages (which are likely bogus anyway) are almost
Peter> impossible to find.
Absolutely right. troff wins a point.
Peter> Because some people *prefer* the output of
Peter> troff/groff.
And some people prefer the output of TeX. Score unchanged.
Peter> Because Computer Modern doesn't look very nice
Peter> on 300 dpi and lower devices
Another judgement call. 11 point CM roman works quite well for me at
300 dpi whereas Adobe Times Roman at the same size doesn't. So, score
remains unchanged.
Peter> and TeX doesn't get along well with Adobe fonts.
I've run TeX with Adobe fonts for a number of years. While it was
painful in the beginning, such is not the case today. Since troff was
around before Adobe fonts were, I'm sure it suffered some ups & downs
as well.
So the final score is troff 1, TeX 0.
But it still doesn't answer the question. If the DTD and the
replacement rules are up to snuff, it doesn't matter whether we go to
TeX, troff, Scribe, or who knows what. The end result is a nicely
typeset document, and the LaTeX results seemed adequate. I don't see
why supporting an additonal output format that has similar end results
is necessary. So, I asked why. :-)
--
Sean Kelly
NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory kelly@fsl.noaa.gov
Boulder Colorado USA http://www-sdd.fsl.noaa.gov/~kelly/
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