History of roff(man7.org) |
History of roff(man7.org) |
I wanted to get that point, so I learned enough troff to write a solution to Towers of Hanoi with it
groff -step -k file.groff > file.pdf
Groff+mom it's like Texlive for TeX.
The last one it's best suited for writers.
With Groff+ms you can typeset equations, letters and articles with a 486 and less than 50MB of used space. It's a gem. Postscript can be set with -Tps for Groff, it may be lighter on rendering. The GV viewer opens both PDF and PS files.
Apparently mom and ms are some packages full of macros to use with Groff. I am not familiar with these tools and was a bit confused until I read some man pages.
A very useful feature, considering so many young kids, specially with not so doing well house income, can have Raspberry pi and produce good looking reports etc for school/ extra curricular activities, comparable to those produced by much powerful and costly hardware and software systems.
I used Groff+mom on a raspberry Pi 3b, and results were quite good for text heavy documents with some tablular data.
There are also some that insist on exe submissions along with your source. That mingw can cross compile for X86_64 Windows from the Raspberry pi so easily is an awesome testament to how nice a dev environment GNU/Linux is.
Groff is lightweight and already installed on most Linux systems, and the build process is way cleaner than TeX. It's easy to make a Python script that reads some data and prints a nice-looking report (or a form letter, etc.)
While we do have more modern stuff like Markdown and ReStructured Text, these are in their own way extremely limited and are primarily focussed upon transformation to HTML. troff is focussed upon printing, and if you want nice PDF reports, and you don't want the slowness and excessive disk space consumption of TeX, it can be an excellent solution.
These days I am more likely to be working in org-mode and using elisp snippets to automate stuff, but roff is a solid fallback for things like quickly turning 100 paragraphs of individual feedback into 100 formatted pdf documents that can be mailed out.