Daily reminder that a true Sup Forumsentooman doesn't use bloated LaTeX, but rather troff/groff

Daily reminder that a true Sup Forumsentooman doesn't use bloated LaTeX, but rather troff/groff.

Other urls found in this thread:

troff.org/prog.html
oreilly.com/openbook/utp/
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

how can I do equations?

/thread

eqn

Stop /thread-ing when you're ignorant. It just makes you look stupid.

wow, thanks user

You're welcome.

wow, there is tons of these features, I've always thought this is just for manpages
troff.org/prog.html

Troff is a full typesetting engine. K&R wrote the C book in it.

oreilly.com/openbook/utp/

daily reminder to just use pandoc since it handles outputting for all these shitty autistic tools for you.

>not being autistic

Is there any actual benefit to using something like this or LaTeX over a regular word processor like Word or Libre Writer? Both of which can do equations just fine, I would add.

Global changes to appearance and formatting, plaintext (making it very portable), ligatures, works well with very large files, easy to manage in the form of multiple files that are compiled at the end (bibliographies, etc.), ability to use a powerful text editor like vim or emacs for composition...

it's a lot easier to hack at the layout since it isn't obtuse xml that can only be written using a gui.

in 2017 though, i'd highly recommend using pandoc though as the syntax is human friendly and nearly powerful enough to outright replace *TeX and the ASTs pandoc outputs are powerful enough to output whatever document layout bullshit you need.

I'd say that, unless you need a specific function of groff or LaTeX (or you have a genuine preference) then you should decide based on your text editor of choice, either vim with (pandoc extended) markdown or emacs with org-mode. Both can handle in-line LaTeX anyway.

>Both of which can do equations just fine

If you're doing simple stuff, sure. More complex things like aligning on equals signs, fancier notations, etc are way harder and slower. Not to mention it just looks like shit. Spacing is always a bit off here and there.

>Some nobodies in Bell Labs
>Fucking Donald Knuth and Lamport
The choice isn't a hard one OP.

>needs to be told to treat a plain document like a plain document and also where the document begins and ends

Is it weird to prefer the somewhat spartan look of groff formatted documents in comparison to the more clean LaTeX ones?

Yes. Equations in all of these are not that great, they often lack complicated features for more advanced math and the way you actually type equation in words is mostly the same as you would type equations in for LaTeX.
Aside from that, you don't have to format anything manually and you get the added bonus of a wide variety of libraries which can create anything you want, especially something like tikz which can create (with a bit of effort) great looking graphics directly in your document.

If you really want some mathematical document to look professional when it comes to equations, text alignment and graphics your only choice is LaTeX.

Another reason why it is wildly used in academia is because it is quite easy to apply a different style to it changing the size of the document and fitting it to the standards of the publishers would be reason to commit suicide when using word.

What is the point of pandoc? The table syntax looks impractical as fuck, and the whole language looks like a huge mess that tries to have features from every imaginable document format ever invented. Markdown, latex, fucking HTML and CSS.

>What is the point of pandoc?

In one answer: to convert document formats.

In another answer: to make markdown (intended for simple HTML) overly complex, but to totally lack the most useful features that complexity should bring but doesn't.