Re: using groff/troff in producing academic journals

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2022 at 12:31:51PM +1000, Damian McGuckin wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Aug 2022, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 
> >I emailed ralph@inputplus.co.uk who owns troff.org to see if he wanted
> >to host papers.  troff.org looks pretty dead so we shall see.  If he is
> >still there, that would be a great place to host example papers.
> 
> One issue is that most of my papers are either confidential or copyright to
> somebody so will limit what I can post.  I am sure that others might be in
> the same boat. I think a thesis is (shared?) copyright between the author
> and the university. We might need some waffle in the directory to cover
> copyright issues. Most papers are not a single file.

Well my papers are copyright sun, sgi, google, bitmover, and there has been
enough time passed that nobody cares any more.  I won't tell other people
what to do, and I wouldn't publish a paper from an on-going company without
their permission, but so much stuff is in the "don't care" category, that
stuff should be published.  Or could be.

> I use MM as a macro package. Is that still relevant to enough people? As
> young Doug reminded me a long time ago, if a macro package does the job for
> you once you learn it, you keep using what you first learnt if. He has been
> an MS person for slightly longer than I have been an MM person.

I'm an MS.  Dabbled slightly in MM, didn't see the point given that I knew
MS, tried ME for a year and it was like the year I tried emacs, went back 
to MS and vi.

> Most of my papers have equations, both simple and complex although I am
> still learning 'eqn' even though I have used it and troff/groff for many
> decades.

My mathy son would like to see those.  

For a lot of people, not the troff nerds, but more casual users, a troff
paper is sort of like a device driver.  There is some Unix quote that
God wrote the first device driver and people have copied that and tweaked
it for their device ever since.  I think a lot of people would be happy
to look through some papers, find one that is close, copy it and change
it to be their paper.  All without having to learn the details (until
they need to).

--lm