Does Groff have a better advantage than Libre Office writer?
Actually, I don't do a lot of paperwork, but I've heard a lot of saying that Groff is good.
(And the fact that there are also original unix versions like roff, Nroff, and Troff) At first glance, compiling a text file written in Markdown language and simply making a pdf looks great. But I wonder if it is a reasonable option in 2021. If one day I have to do a lot of paperwork, is it worth learning how to use groff? Are there any special advantages of groff over libre office writers or other document writing programs? |
roff language is an old vestige from the beginnings of Unix. If you don't already know it, there's no much point learning it now (beyond what's needed to write a manpage). You can convert Markdown to lots of formats with pandoc.
Yes, roff is Turing-complete, so you can do some cool things with it that are impossible in Markdown. But if my publishing needs were going beyond what Markdown can handle, I'd choose LaTeX rather than Groff as the next logical step upwards. |
I love groff, but it's just a tool. Comparing it to LibreOffice is like comparing a broom to a vacuum. They can both do the job and it is a matter of preference and circumstance.
Another fine option is Halibut by Simon Tatham. |
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For me, the choice between a word processor and LaTeX depends on what you want to do with the result. If you are producing documents for your own purposes, rather than for printing and distributing, a word processor is the obvious choice since you can see what you are doing as you do it.
I suspect the disadvantages of word processors are exaggerated by some old-school Unix types. I read a study a couple of years ago where a mathematician prepared the same paper using LaTeX and MS Word. There was nothing to choose in quality and Word was quicker. |
Thank you to everyone who answered. It seems good to leave Groff just a realm of curiosity. :)
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I like that LaTeX follows the "separate content and presentation" concept which, for me, anyway, makes it easier to get a document written and the display details added later. I've never seen anyone use Word in that way, instead the user begins fiddling with font sizes from the get-go and/or correcting the assumptions that Word styles insert into the document. It seems to be just too tempting to avoid it. (For me, Emacs, Okular, and make are WYSIWYG-enough.) If WYSIWYG is your thing... you could employ a similar workflow: text editor, and "groff filename | gv -". Laugh if you like but I know at least one EE Ph.D. dissertation's drafts were written using IBM's version of nroff (SCRIPT?) on VM/CMS. You can't say that markup text processors aren't used for serious work. Cheers... |
Piping is awesome
For me the ability to pipe to groff is a huge advantage, because you can write own preprocessors easy. I am an student (theology, so no math or graphs needed) and we need to cite in a specific way, which i was not able to find even in latex's enormous bibliography styles database. So what i came up with writing a perl script, which hooks in before groff and so groff sees the footnotes already formated to my needs. As i wrote papers with latex and groff, and before openoffice i find the workflow with groff easy, i use vim to write, but every good texteditor should be able to do the same, you create snippets to autocomplete your most used commands, bind your pipe with your own preprocessors to a key and your fine, just like in an Latex gui programm. And as i'm using the mom macro set i don't have to mess around with the bare roff calls, they are as easy to remember as Latex commands. You can read in text from external sources if you need or cat files together, if you want to keep chapters or so seperate.
Long story short, with groff unless a WYSIWYG program you can make use of all the gnu utilities you have to manipulate text, and as this is intended by groff this use is even better as in other languages like latex i have found. Ah and it's way faster than Latex for my use case, as said i write Texts with citations mostly. |
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