2011-10-05



While reading the Nroff/Troff User's Manual in the  updated  ver-
sion  for  the  Heirloom  documentation  tools, I discovered some
may-be inconsistencies.  I started to prepare a  patch.  This  of
course  involved  digging through the troff code of the document.
To be honest: It's plain awful!  :-) This is mainly caused by not
using  any preprocessors or macro packages -- everything is plain
troff. But I also wonder if it's sometimes the result  of  aiming
for  perfect results. In perfecting the last 10% of the generated
output, one clutters the sources  by  90%.  Probably  this  isn't
worth it, but I'm not sure about my opinion.

(Anyway, in this case we must not forget that the  document  acts
as a show case for troff's capabilities, too.)


Reading the manual on paper, however, revealed  more  information
than  I  could  gather from reading it on screen. I probably read
slower and deeper when I read on paper. This appears to  be  ori-
ginated in the kind of information processing typical for the two
types of media. On paper: lots of novels; linear  reading  style;
never  skip  sentences.  On  screen:  Huge masses of information;
often non-linear reading style; often skip  sections.  Hence,  if
you want to get all the contents, print it.  :-)



http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>