Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!gatech!ncsuvx!lll-winken!uunet!munnari!moncskermit!goanna!isaac
From: isaac@goanna.oz (Isaac Balbin)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: inherent troff faults
Message-ID: <1309@goanna.oz>
Date: 2 Jun 88 05:14:39 GMT
Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 33

I am/have been a troff (-me) user for years. All this TeX
talk and WYSIWYG talk makes you take notice every now and again.
However, you are so entrenched, and like the terse but powerful
syntax that you defer any change. I will still probably do that.
On the other hand, every now and again you get an annoying re-occurrence
of the dreaded environment stack problem with troff that rears its ugly
head. Consider my experience today. A simple
.sh 2 "The $call$ function"

the $'s are my eqn delimiters. Why put call in $'s? simply because
I use it and other variables/formulas throughout in a different font
and I have a global font of CW (for you postscript types) for eqn symbols.

So what was the output?
The 		came out in bold font as I would expect
call		came out in CW font as I would expect
function	came out in roman! font unexpectedly.

I expected bold, wouldn't you?
It didn't appear to stack the fonts properly when popping them.
I haven't thought about the "why" too much and this is my guess ... I could
be wrong, but that is irrelevant.

Then in the same paper, on one page, the date at the bottom just disappeared
mysteriously. I never use a .hl inside keeps because they come out really 
screwy - too long, too short or dashed lines. This one is an environment 
problem (.ev) too.

The bottom line is that there are companies that distribute so called
debugged/improved versions of (di)troff. Do they knowingly distribute buggy
code, or have they fixed these things? I once heard from an unnamed 
very well known guru that these things can be fixed, but then lots of 
documentation would be broken. I am not convinced by this argument at all.
Well, do we fix troff or go to TeX quite apart from any philosphical reasons?