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?