Typesetting Engines: A Programmer's Perspective

Re:Typesetting Engines: A Programmer's Perspective by liendolucas on Monday November 11, 2024 @06:55AM (#42106514)

Surprised that groff is not mentioned. I've recently used it to typeset my CV and oh boy... It feels like something really really arcane. Despite fighting with it at the beginning I'm quite happy for the result and also like that I can now version the code (no more LibreOffice for that). The key difference between typesetting and textprocessing is that typesetting is like programming a document, you have basically access to common functionality offered by programming languages, which of course gives you a lot of power and flexibility. The thing I do complain about groff is its documentation (man pages are like very crude to follow on commands) and also there are almost no resources (tutorials, recipes, guides) out there.

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Re:Typesetting Engines: A Programmer's Perspective by xiaohanyu on Monday November 11, 2024 @09:00AM (#42107140)

I know groff, at least the bible K&R C programming book is published by groff, if I am not wrong.

For me, I think groff/LaTeX/SILE/typst all belongs to same category, i.e, the author write some markup language, then processed by some processors, then get an output. I chose LaTeX and Typst as the classic ones in my post:

- LaTeX is the classic, old school typesetting engine - Typst, clearly more modern, with many advanced design like incremental compilation, wasm and web app, instant preview, better error message.

For others, groff/SILE, to be honest I don't have time to dive into each of these.

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Do you see any advantages of groff over LaTeX?

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Re:Typesetting Engines: A Programmer's Perspective by liendolucas on Monday November 11, 2024 @12:19PM (#42108743)

I haven't used LaTeX in ages to be honest. I guess I could give it a shot and compare pros/cons between them. If I'm not wrong also the book "The Go Programming Language" by Kernighan and Donovan has also been typeset with groff (I think there's actually an email sent by someone to Kernighan mentioning how beautifully the book was typeset and he explains why he didn't choose LaTeX and leaned towards groff). The main reason why I used it was because is a tool that has been in unix systems for ages and was simply curious about it and re-writting my CV with it was an excuse to give it a shot.

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Re:Typesetting Engines: A Programmer's Perspective by giraffe_lady on Monday November 11, 2024 @09:23AM (#42107304)

You might be the only person to write groff by hand in a generation.

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Re:Typesetting Engines: A Programmer's Perspective by zvr on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @11:11AM (#42185034)

Having used many *roff variants (e.g., troff, nroff, ditroff, groff) over decades and also having rather extensive experience with LaTeX, I'd now definitely choose the latter for any serious typesetting task.

Pain points include many customization points: re-creating exact document specifications provided externally, using specific typefaces, creating your own macros... Oh, and leaving ASCII (or ISO-8859-1) for multi-script characters. These are not blocking points (there are ways to overcome them, if you find the solutions), but are still major pains.

Today's groff is a very fine software, if you are satisfied with its default settings and your task is in the domain it handles.

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