Re: Heirloom Troff for NetBSD (was: Removing ARCNET stuffs)

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> I'm arguing that

> 	.B here

> is better than

> 	<b>here</b>

> because that ratio is 3/4 (counting the space after ".B") versus 7/4.
> IOW, troff supports the tersest markup language.  And that's a good
> thing because it minimizes the author's work.

Only if (a) you measure `work' in nothing but keystrokes and (b) if the
author types the markup directly.

Neither of those is obviously true to me.  In my experience, (a) is
definitely false but (b) is mostly true, the latter largely, I suspect,
an artifact of the kind of workflow I handle well.  (I've heard of GUI
tools for building HTML - my memory hands me the name Dreamweaver -
which make (b) very false and make it hard to compare work levels since
the user gestures involved are so very different.)

> [troff i]s lightweight, in terms of both user input and machine
> resources.

It is not, however, lightweight in terms of brain space needed to
understand it.  It is lightweight in terms of brain space only for
users who are using a package like -mandoc and have no interest in
doing anything not provided for by it.

However, typesetting is a complex task; anything that does it either
provides only limited capabilities (plain text is an extreme example;
-mandoc is a less extreme example) or forces its user to deal with that
complexity at some level (troff and TeX are examples).

I think measuring complexity in pure characters is specious.  There was
a time (ASR-33s anyone?) when it made a lot more sense, but, today, not
even I consider "ls" inherently better than "list" because it's half
the length - one of my favourite tools is called git-interactive,
rather than something like gi.  I think troff syntax is a good thing to
use not because it's terse but rather because it has a lot of history
behind it (documents written using it, people knowing it), enough to
outweigh the minor advantages of switching away from it (all IMO).

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