[texhax] LaTeX in old computer

Hartmut Henkel hartmut_henkel at gmx.de
Thu Feb 1 23:09:20 CET 2007


On Thu, 1 Feb 2007, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> It would be more interesting to compare TeX with word processors which
> provide a comparable output quality.

Mainly the roff family (http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/utp/), and
scribe (seems to be completely extinct by now) come to the mind. The
roffs are still rocking, actually more than ever by groff
(http://groff.ffii.org/) and nroff/troff
(http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/). Since the seventies they can be used
also for mathematical typesetting. Some time ago they adopted TeX's
paragraph alignment algorithm. But while in say 1986 TeX was already
available on PCs, the roffs were still found only on workstations. They
have a nice tool/pipe philosophy, different programs chained for tables,
equations, pictures,... Btw, TeXLive 2007 will contain a script for
converting pic(groff) generated pictures into something that can be
further processed by pdftex.

Regards, Hartmut


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