Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.Carlqvist@deadspam.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Mar 2023 03:52:06 +0000, Javier wrote:
>> In fact, TeX is not very popular among UNIX programmers, and software
>> documentation is seldom written in LaTeX (with the exception of people
>> doing maths and physics).
>
> This is true, if you are only writing some programming documentation like
> some design description or a requirement specification most people will
> find it easier and more efficient to use som graphical office application
> like LibreOffice or MS Word.

Not all of them where done on graphical office applications. Kernighan's books
are typeset with pic|tbl|eqn|troff -ms (as stated in page iv of K&R).

> But Latex really shines when it comes to describing mathematical formulas
> or writing long documents with hundreds or thousands of figures.

Richard W Stevens books have hundreds of figures, and IIRC they were
typeset with troff. But you are right about the equations. Nothing
is so powerfull for equations as LaTeX.

Javier <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> Not all of them where done on graphical office applications. Kernighan's books
> are typeset with pic|tbl|eqn|troff -ms (as stated in page iv of K&R).
>
>> But Latex really shines when it comes to describing mathematical formulas
>> or writing long documents with hundreds or thousands of figures.
>
> Richard W Stevens books have hundreds of figures, and IIRC they were
> typeset with troff. But you are right about the equations. Nothing
> is so powerfull for equations as LaTeX.

What I want to illustrate, is the fact that the UNIX world didn't
embrace LaTeX, and there is a good reason for that: its implementation
is not simple.

Den 2023-03-12 skrev Javier <invalid@invalid.invalid>:
> Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.Carlqvist@deadspam.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, 12 Mar 2023 03:52:06 +0000, Javier wrote:
>>> In fact, TeX is not very popular among UNIX programmers, and software
>>> documentation is seldom written in LaTeX (with the exception of people
>>> doing maths and physics).
>>
>> This is true, if you are only writing some programming documentation like
>> some design description or a requirement specification most people will
>> find it easier and more efficient to use som graphical office application
>> like LibreOffice or MS Word.
>
> Not all of them where done on graphical office applications. Kernighan's books
> are typeset with pic|tbl|eqn|troff -ms (as stated in page iv of K&R).
>
I guess he had to given his role early UNIX development :-)

/Martin

Martin Schöön <martin.schoon@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Not all of them where done on graphical office applications. Kernighan's books
>> are typeset with pic|tbl|eqn|troff -ms (as stated in page iv of K&R).
>>
> I guess he had to given his role early UNIX development :-)

They had to justify their funding to AT&T management :-)

https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/taoup.pdf

Unix's first real job, in 1971, was to support what would now be called
word processing for the Bell Labs patent department; the first Unix
application was the ancestor of the nroff(1) text formatter. This
project justified the purchase of a PDP-11, a much more capable
minicomputer. Management remained blissfully unaware that the
word-processing system that Thompson and colleagues were building was
incubating an operating system. Operating systems were not in the Bell
Labs plan - AT&T had joined the Multics consortium precisely to avoid
doing an operating system on its own.

Javier <invalid@invalid.invalid> writes:

> maus <maus@mail.com> wrote:
>
>> Lamport's book on latex is all you will ever need.

Tnx for the pointer, saved for reference, but see below.

> [snip]
> latexmk makes compiling documents much nicer....
> [snip]
> Another thing that will piss off somebody from the UNIX world is how
> poor the manpage documentation is. There is an info manual.
> It does document the language quite well, but does not say much about
> the CLI tools. In emacs you should see it with
>
> M-: (info "(latex2e) Top")

Gak!

> I began using both LaTeX and UNIX almost at the same time, so I was
> not really questioning the design of TeX when I was learning, but the
> OP...

That would be me.

> ...who has been using UNIX for decades, will be shocked by the design
> of the TeX tools.
>
> For the OP, I would think twice before diving into LaTeX. It has many
> pitfalls, error reporting is not always clear and takes long time to learn.
> If the OP has a simpler way of writing letters, I would put LaTeX aside.

This is probably the course I'll follow. "Never say never..." but I
have way too many other things to do, most of them more useful and
more interesting, to undertake beating up Latex without a compelling
motive.

Tnx,
--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada

Den 2023-03-12 skrev Javier <invalid@invalid.invalid>:
> Martin Schöön <martin.schoon@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Not all of them where done on graphical office applications. Kernighan's books
>>> are typeset with pic|tbl|eqn|troff -ms (as stated in page iv of K&R).
>>>
>> I guess he had to given his role in early UNIX development :-)
>
> They had to justify their funding to AT&T management :-)
>
> https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/taoup.pdf
>
> Unix's first real job, in 1971, was to support what would now be called
> word processing for the Bell Labs patent department; the first Unix
> application was the ancestor of the nroff(1) text formatter. This
> project justified the purchase of a PDP-11, a much more capable
> minicomputer. Management remained blissfully unaware that the
> word-processing system that Thompson and colleagues were building was
> incubating an operating system. Operating systems were not in the Bell
> Labs plan - AT&T had joined the Multics consortium precisely to avoid
> doing an operating system on its own.

Thanks for the PDF. It is created by pdfTeX14.h so right on topic :-)

Kernighan himself on Computerphile:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFK6RG47bww&list=PLzH6n4zXuckqZ90zLyy36qjO5YIn1RulG

/Martin

On 2023-03-12 at 08:04 ADT, Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.Carlqvist@deadspam.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Mar 2023 03:52:06 +0000, Javier wrote:
>> In fact, TeX is not very popular among UNIX programmers, and software
>> documentation is seldom written in LaTeX (with the exception of people
>> doing maths and physics).

> This is true, if you are only writing some programming documentation like
> some design description or a requirement specification most people will
> find it easier and more efficient to use som graphical office application
> like LibreOffice or MS Word.

That presumes they know one of those; not everyone who does software
development was indoctrinated into the M$ tool space. I've seen people use
all sorts of tools to produce documentation. (Sometimes even just ordinary
plain text!)

Jim

On 2023-03-11 at 03:24 AST, Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> wrote:
>
> Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.Carlqvist@deadspam.com> writes:
>
>> On Wed, 08 Mar 2023 01:25:46 -0400, Mike Spencer wrote:
>>
>>> I don't have a word processor. On the very rare occasions that I
>>> need to print a business letter, I compose it in simple HTML and print
>>> from the browser.
>>
>> HTML might work, but if you want really nice letters you should learn
>> latex!
>
> But when I went to my shiny new Linux system a few years later, it had
> Latex or Tetex or something that was a dialect of TEX. I bumbled
> about a bit but never found a tutorial that was simple enough to just,
> yew kno, bang out a nice page. All seemed too much like learning a
> new programming language (yeah, I know what a macro is but...) to
> become a pro compositor.

I find LaTeX to be the ultimate poorly-designed system. It attempts to be
all things to all people, and then falls over its own feet trying to do
that. Because of all the "helpful" packages people have contributed over
time, situations where package A conflicts with package B show up with
disturbing regularity.

(plain) TeX gets a lot of hate from LaTeX people, but if all you want to do
is to bang out a nice page, you may find plain TeX easier to use. By
itself it is pretty low-level, and without writing your own macros you
would end up explicitly changing fonts, explicitly specifying when text is
to be centered, and so on. But if you accept that, the learning curve is
pretty short. If this is of any interest to you, feel free to contact me
directly (that's my real email addr above!) and I might be able to get you
going with plain TeX very quickly. For, at least, banging out one-page
documents.

Cheers.
Jim

On Mon, 13 Mar 2023 21:14:19 -0300, Jim Diamond wrote:

> On 2023-03-12 at 08:04 ADT, Henrik Carlqvist
> <Henrik.Carlqvist@deadspam.com> wrote:
>> This is true, if you are only writing some programming documentation
>> like some design description or a requirement specification most people
>> will find it easier and more efficient to use som graphical office
>> application like LibreOffice or MS Word.
>
> That presumes they know one of those; not everyone who does software
> development was indoctrinated into the M$ tool space. I've seen people
> use all sorts of tools to produce documentation. (Sometimes even just
> ordinary plain text!)

Yes, but the learning curve will not be as steep for a graphical office
application as for Latex. However, once you learn Latex you can use the
same favorite editor for your documentation as you use for programming.

regards Henrik

On 2023-03-15 at 03:26 ADT, Henrik Carlqvist <Henrik.Carlqvist@deadspam.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Mar 2023 21:14:19 -0300, Jim Diamond wrote:
>
>> On 2023-03-12 at 08:04 ADT, Henrik Carlqvist
>> <Henrik.Carlqvist@deadspam.com> wrote:
>>> This is true, if you are only writing some programming documentation
>>> like some design description or a requirement specification most people
>>> will find it easier and more efficient to use som graphical office
>>> application like LibreOffice or MS Word.

>> That presumes they know one of those; not everyone who does software
>> development was indoctrinated into the M$ tool space. I've seen people
>> use all sorts of tools to produce documentation. (Sometimes even just
>> ordinary plain text!)

> Yes, but the learning curve will not be as steep for a graphical office
> application as for Latex.

I think that is true to a point. A brand new can bang out a word-processor
document with little help. However, if one wants to learn the "advanced"
features of word processors there will be a non-trivial learning curve
there as well. But it seems a lot of people (that I've seen) never get
much beyond the beginner stage with word processors, and maybe this
(alleged at least by me) learning curve is the reason for it.

Having said that, you can bang out a simple document in plain TeX if you
just know enough to put "\bye" or "\end" at the end. (And you need to know
how to use some text editor, of course.)

> However, once you learn Latex you can use the same favorite editor for
> your documentation as you use for programming.

I agree whole-heartedly. The "editor" in word-processors is one of the
things I really detest about them.

I've never used Lyx, but I wonder how someone who knows nothing about
either word processors or LaTeX, given Lyx, would compare to someone who is
given a word processor to use.

In any case, I still think that the current state of LaTeX is a botch.
Perhaps when LaTeX 3 comes out it won't be such a mess.

Jim