[metapost] Does MetaPost catch on?

[Stephan Hennig]

Am 03.09.2010 02:28, schrieb Timothy Murphy:
> On Thursday, September 02, 2010 09:53:34 pm Stephan Hennig wrote:
>
>> I haven't find the time to learn troff, yet I think the learning curve
>> is less steep than TeX's.  But to cite from documentation of troff's
>> mathematics package:
>
> I find your argument bizarre,

Reading again, I think I missed one point in the argument.  Troff might 
not necessarily be that much easier to learn than TeX, but much more 
easy to try out if there were a small stand-alone distribution of 
MetaPost + troff.  Talking more rubbish, couldn't troff even be embedded 
into the MetaPost executable (only mpost, not mplib) so that it's always 
available?  Reading the prevalent negative replies to my idea I guess I 
have to recognize: it doesn't catch on.


> since I never heard of anyone using troff
> (except inadvertently when reading man pages)
> for at least 20 years.

I did.  There even are some on this list.


> To learn troff in order to use Metapost would be very odd, I think.

Sure, users with a TeX background are far better off with TeX.  I'm 
thinking about non-TeX users that kick-off a TeX distribution just for 
the size and number of files and directories on the hard-disk that have 
no equivalent value after a day or even a week of trying out MetaPost 
(and TeX).

Best regards,
Stephan Hennig