This looks really useful for automatic document/report generation. Makes it look very easy to write scripts that output groff files based on software test/profiling/debugging/etc. I want to try it myself! Great video.
you memed me into using latex and then you memed me into using rmd and now you're memeing me into this the ultimate minimalism is using a pen and paper, who even needs vim
There is also a technical reason for starting each sentence on a new line. When the last character of a line is the period ('.') groff will take that to mean that this is the end of a sentence and will insert extra space after the period. However, if the period appears in the middle of a line it will be understood to be just another character in the middle of a sentence. TeX does something similar, but the other way around. A period is always understood to be the end of a sentence, so if you want to typeset something like "Dear Mr. Smith" you would have to write it as "Dear Mr.~Smith" to tell TeX that the period is not the end of a sentence.
If you want to get really pedantic, TeX looks at the character before the period to decide how big the space should be. If it's an uppercase letter, TeX assumes it's an acronym or initialism and uses a regular space. If it's a lowercase letter, TeX assumes the period is ending a sentence and uses a quad space. (I forget what it does if it's anything else.) If you want the opposite behavior, you use "\@." instead of ".". A tie ("~") is the same as a regular space, but forbids line breaking at that point, so it can be used as an override where appropriate (e.g., in your example, "Mr.~Smith", where it's considered a typographical error to have a line break between the two).
What's your current setup like? And what do you use it for? I was considering groff to write some physics papers, but you've convinced me to stick with LaTeX for now. I'm still looking for something better, though.
C and Linux first caught my interest when I was in school, and I guess they won't stop haunting me to this very day, so I subbed feeling I can't avoid them for much longer. I don't know why, since I've always thought I was too stupid to really get the most out of them, but now TH-cam seems to have teamed up with my tormenters, so looks like I don't really have a say in the matter, lol. Yeah, 32 years of age is just the right time to get neck deep in the Unix-based OSs and programming, sure, why not.
it's addicting bro. I used to use Windows and write my programs in vscode. One day I installed a server version of ubuntu in WSL for work and started using it. I installed/configured tmux, vim, and some other stuff, and now I can't get away from the terminal
I used troff decades ago. I tried to use groff a few years back and discovered I'd forgotten more about it than I ever knew! 😞 Maybe I should have another look.
After seeing all of these (admittedly cool) typesetting tools, I can't help but appreciate Org-mode even more every time. It's so elegant and functional when editing/reading the plaintext, and it has all the necessary outputs as well, and can even be routed through Groff or LaTex for rendering. I think it'll be a very long time before something tops Spacemacs and Org-mode for me.
Sadly, Luke does not yet recognize the manifold blessings of Saint iGNUcious. In time he too will move to the GNU/Emacs operating system, or GNU PLUS EMACS as it is better known.
Back in the 1980's one of the most popular word processors (on MS-DOS) borrowed the idea of "dot commands". It was called WordStar. My dad raved about it. I used a similar shareware program called Word Fugue while I was still at high school. I could touch type at the time, and remember dot commands being a very efficient way to work. Your fingers never have to leave the keyboard's home row. Also slightly related, I discovered um this week. It's a note making tool for writing and then reading your own man pages in Markdown. They're converted to nroff automatically when you read them (so they really do work like man pages). Perfect for making notes about terminal-based software you're learning, and then quickly looking things up later. Available in the Arch AUR, and homebrew. Also on GitHub.
These videos are incredible. I installed arch, ran LARBS, and can follow exactly what's going on. Using groff now because I was to put off by laTex. Thanks for slinging great stuff like this. I haven't used windows or mac for two months now. They are almost completely unnecessary
Thank you for this. I'm writing an presentation in LaTeX/beamer. And one application I thought that groff could be useful is for producing the manuscript within the same LaTeX file. This is done by piping the LaTeX file out to grep and awk to search for a certain keyword that contains text to be parsed by groff. In that way, I produce the pdf that contains my manuscript from the same file as the presentation.
Wow, I wish I'd known about groff when I was in university. It's beautifully elegant how you can script exactly the way you want your document formatted. The imprecise tools in Microsoft Word always set off my OCD.
I don't know if I already made a comment about this, but grog is a useful wrapper that will guess which macros you are using. By default it outputs the required command to standard output, but you can give it the --run argument to make it (unsurprisingly) run the command. For example, $ grog -Tpdf --run somedoc.ms > somedoc.pdf Or, $ grog -T pdf somedoc.ms groff -T pdf -s -t -p -ms somedoc.ms $ echo "Wow, thank you so much."
Everything was fine until i wanted the ℝ symbol U211D. I got stuck when it got to fonts, i found some resources but didnt really was more involved than i had hoped. I love it otherwise. Thanks for introducing me to it! :D I'd love to see more on groff. Cheers
Yay I have been witing for this. Wanted to learn how to use it but was missing on understandable resources. Thank you Luke, you have been a positive force in my life.
Important! I was struggling to get "ääkköset" working (unicode support). The solution is to use the preprocessor *preconv* or groff -k! Do not waste your time trying to find the encoding for your language and setting it in your text editor, use preconv!
I'm not shitting you. I'm translating an essay that i've written from my native language into English so i wanted to give it a shot writing it in mousepad and compiling it with pandoc. I've just started yesterday. And now you upload this ... oh well, i guess switching won't hurt.
groff works with other unix utilities, the preprocessors I mention at the end of the video, to do just that. `refer` does references, `eqn` does math equations, etc.
Is there any minimal ms word Linux solution? Roughly 50% of my coworkers and my boss use word for papers. They rely heavily on the "follow changes " function. I would like to have a fully compatible Linux version. Preferably text only? I could convince them to stick to latex/markdown.
next videos - Customizing groff/troff Macros and Other Basics - th-cam.com/video/kJ_TXZB4Gm4/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=LukeSmith Your Brain Using REFER to do your bibliographies automatically in groff/troff - th-cam.com/video/yTQbi_E_Gys/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=LukeSmithLukeSmithVerified cmd: groff -ms sample.ms -Tpdf > sample.pdf preprocess for refer refer -p doc/bibliogragh sample.ms | groff -ms sample.ms -Tpdf > sample.pdf ----------------------------------------- ------ sample.ms---------------- ----------------------------------------- .SO macro.ms .TL title .AU author .AI college .NH num heading .NH 2 num heading .SH 2 no-num heading .PP paragraph .[ book .] ---- end ----------------------------- ------------------------------------- -------- macro.ms ----------- .de BL .UL "under line text" .. ----- end ------------------------
I love your videos Luke, but please tell me. I might not have gotten the point. But how is this better than using a normal word processor? Damn you have to put the bold words on a separate line, you have to compile after every change. can't you automate that it compiles every 2 seconds or so? And what if it does not compile in a really big doc, How long does it take to find the mistake(s)?
If you want to autocompile, the lazier way would be to write a "while true" loop with the Groff command, or abuse the "watch" command, which you normally use to track the output of a command, but you can use it for this too. watch -n 2 "groff -ms groff.ms -T pdf > groff.pdf" 2 is the waiting time between repeats and can be decimal (0.1) too. The quotes aren't necessary in this case, but are needed in some esoteric case where bash can't figure out if an option flag is part of watch or the command you're trying to pass to watch.
I'm oh-so-much on your train, ever was, completely my flavor of minimalism/GNUism/Unixism/Whateverism, sometimes I think we know each other for years. I even wrote my own obituary in the terminal ;) No, seriously, compatibility FTW. Plus: I learn everytime something new & fascinating when I click on your channel.
If using groff to output html, would math equations etc. be formatted as image tags in the html (png perhaps?) or would it be something else like svg? I'm interested in potentially using this to generate web pages. Currently I'm using a static site generator, but math equations require a javascript library as a dependency to render them on the client-side. I'd like to avoid that dependency if possible, and got for something more lightweight and unix-y.
WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU TO SEE THE LIGHT, LUKE. But why not -mom macros? The documentation is amazing, it includes vim settings, it's more powerful than -ms and easier to use. Also, I'm sure you know, but you can use inline stuff for \f[I]italics\f[P] and \[B]bold\[P] . There's also a way to alias a blank line to .PP to make groff even easier to read. Loads of documentation in /usr/share/doc/groff-1.22.3/ (for all macros) and info '(groff)ms' for -ms macros
Neatroff is a bit better, that is, if you arrange the binaries, fonts, macros and the scripts to call it all in a pipeline in a more convenient way. Add ghostscript and jfbview to it, et voila, you have purely console-based publishing system. And I'm not sure whether groff can be statically linked, I managed to do this for neatroff in Alpine Linux. Also, preparing custom fonts in neatroff is much less headache than with any other roff implementation.
I really never understood the whole thing with having a compiler for word processing and page layout aspects. I'm a big fan of efficiency, which is why I like the command line as a general rule, but when it comes to formatting of these sort of documents a WYSIWYG editor just seems sooo much more efficient.
because word processors are user-unfriendly and packed with a million features you'll never need. writing equations in word is a nightmare; in google docs it's a bit better because you can use some TeX instead of clicking all those little buttons, but it's still a nightmare. formatting paragraphs, headings, and such is difficult because you get one paragraph which is indented in a slightly wrong way, and no matter what you type or click it just won't be like the other paragraphs. or maybe you want to make a bulleted list, but you press enter one too many times and now you're "outside" the list and when you get back in the list the spacing is wrong. or maybe you just want the damn list to be indented to the same level as its surroundings but word automatically indents it for you and you can't "un-indent" it
Thank you Luke for interesting videos! I have one problem with this one to setup correctly. How do you get .ms document output to pdf with latin characters like Ö or Ä?
When I tried to export with the pdf and the second command `groff -ms groff.ms > groff.ps` | `groff -ms groff.ms -T pdf > groff.pdf`, I get errors like 'groff: can't find 'DESC' file groff: fatal error: invalid device 'pdf''. Has any one encountered similar issues ?
I recently started using Groff myself and am using the Mom macros. Have you tried that one? I find it to be a bit more complete than ms and yet still pretty small.
Thanks a lot for this introduction to groff. Another hidden unix gem. A bit off topic: what terminal font did you use in this screencast? Wasn't able to find it in your dotfiles. Looks like Monaco, but with slightly different shapes.
So I installed Groff then did vim Groff.ms and started typing. It was not number, wouldn’t let me type at first, switched file type and wouldn’t compile . What’s up?
hi dear luke ... i'm new to the subscriber ... i watched few of your videos and i have the pleasure to join your members community ... this is really the beauty of linux ... as much as it is basic as much as it is powerful and wonderful
What do you do/use to create editable files? I.e. if you needed to send a draft to a professor/colleague for their direct comments? Would you still create a pdf in groff? Thanks
How do you compile foreign languages in groff? I'm trying to make a pdf out of russian groff document, but all russian letters turn into glibberish. -T utf8 makes no difference either.
Great info... I'll test it in Cygwin... or do you have another suggestion for using that tools inside Windows 10... ?maybe some GNU/other tools (for troff and PS/PDF compilation) i don't know about ! ;-)
i haven't used cygwin in a while but i like wsl. i use vcxsrv to run a headless x server in the background, and my terminal is powershell with a powerline font (for fancy prompt and status lines in tmux and vim). it works great but a bare metal linux installation would be ideal. i don't know if it exists but something like a server distribution with X windowing so that you can open windows from the command line, but there is no desktop - that would be it
I highly doubt you can do that on windows. It is a totally different window managing. If you want an i3-like desktop, better use Linux or BSD. Although I'm not entirely sure I know a distro with i3 -like DE as default, one can set one up with realitive ease at least on Arch. (I personally use sway on Arch)
@@opiniondiscarded6650 Nope, Windows File System is fucking terrible, give a try to any task that involves high IO and you will perceive a massive lag. Try zsh with "oh-my-zsh' under MSYS2 for example, is far from being usable.
I am really new to Linux so could you tell me why this is an advantage over something like a GUI text editor? You mentioned something about extensibility. Forgive my ignorance. Lol
Some people in linux just like typing fucking everything they do, basically. I can't see how this would be any quicker than me pressing enter or tab a few times to format things as i want them in a gui, but i guess some people have certain specific use cases (or mental problems) preventing them from using what we've all mostly accepted as a better way, lol. I keed, but yeah
URGENT! Read this:
lukesmith.xyz/deletion
It says “not found”
rip 404 nginx. pretty funny luke didn't custom nginx error code
Instead of the "xyz/deletion" page, is the "xyz/updates/deletion" page the real one?
If I may interject. The person you all have been referring to as Luke Smith is actually Gnu/Luke Smith or better yet Gnu layered on top of Luke Smith
GNU Plus Luke Smith
No, Richard, it's 'Luke Smith', not 'GNU+Luke Smith'.
*tips fedora*
@@xerneastrainer8111 Tips Debian
@@pedrogonzalez5590 *wobbles my fat in respect*
Plain text files is the next step, and you will be rediscovering pen and paper soon after that.
Pictograph, anyone?
blackrastafarian how about speaking and using your memory
@@yimoawanardo i think emitting some sort of pheromone would be better.
I think clay tables and straw are quite minimal. And summerian alphabet can be written using just the same shape!
markdown
Are you just procrastinating on writing your thesis?
@@thewooque Honestly relatable.
no
@@thewooque 6 months? I'm 9 months in and still configuring ...
Yes.
all of us will one day end up in this comment section
groff > latex > R markdown > groff
pen + paper > groff
Officially giving up investing anymore time learning your newest minimal doc editor meme
The inevitable conclusion is just writing everything in plaintext and using `pr` to format for printing.
Editing pdf binary when?
pdf is not a binary format though...
>not writing your thesis by hand
This looks really useful for automatic document/report generation. Makes it look very easy to write scripts that output groff files based on software test/profiling/debugging/etc. I want to try it myself! Great video.
_groff - front-end for the groff document formatting system_
Well that's very helpful.
you memed me into using latex
and then you memed me into using rmd
and now you're memeing me into this
the ultimate minimalism is using a pen and paper, who even needs vim
No true minimalism is just thinking
@@trafficcone3620 No, true minimalism is not thinking at all.
@@AppalachianAcademics.
There is also a technical reason for starting each sentence on a new line. When the last character of a line is the period ('.') groff will take that to mean that this is the end of a sentence and will insert extra space after the period. However, if the period appears in the middle of a line it will be understood to be just another character in the middle of a sentence.
TeX does something similar, but the other way around. A period is always understood to be the end of a sentence, so if you want to typeset something like "Dear Mr. Smith" you would have to write it as "Dear Mr.~Smith" to tell TeX that the period is not the end of a sentence.
If you want to get really pedantic, TeX looks at the character before the period to decide how big the space should be. If it's an uppercase letter, TeX assumes it's an acronym or initialism and uses a regular space. If it's a lowercase letter, TeX assumes the period is ending a sentence and uses a quad space. (I forget what it does if it's anything else.) If you want the opposite behavior, you use "\@." instead of ".". A tie ("~") is the same as a regular space, but forbids line breaking at that point, so it can be used as an override where appropriate (e.g., in your example, "Mr.~Smith", where it's considered a typographical error to have a line break between the two).
I wrote a paper at university in nroff, back in '85 or so.
Can you recommended me some resources to learn groff?
I can't seem to find them.
@@safalpiya3759 troff.org
I tried groff way back. Didn't stay with it since writing math in groff (through the eqn preprocessor) is a huge pain compared to LaTeX.
What's your current setup like? And what do you use it for? I was considering groff to write some physics papers, but you've convinced me to stick with LaTeX for now. I'm still looking for something better, though.
to me writing equations in groff is much simpler and much clearer than writing them in latex.
@@cosmojg SIle is a LaTeX clone you might want to look into.
Uncle Luke's manifesto when??
Thanks, just rewrote my CV in groff. So much nicer than all that word processor nonsense.
@ass hole I just use Overleaf, makes it much easier to make emergency edits and work on computers that are not mine.
ass hole wow yeah so much more efficient and hassle free than using Google Docs, lemme tell ya
based af
C and Linux first caught my interest when I was in school, and I guess they won't stop haunting me to this very day, so I subbed feeling I can't avoid them for much longer. I don't know why, since I've always thought I was too stupid to really get the most out of them, but now TH-cam seems to have teamed up with my tormenters, so looks like I don't really have a say in the matter, lol. Yeah, 32 years of age is just the right time to get neck deep in the Unix-based OSs and programming, sure, why not.
There's no better time to learn than now
Are you on Linux rn ?
@@hectorcanizales5900 yup, why wouldn't I be
It's never late to learn something new, if you are interested.
it's addicting bro. I used to use Windows and write my programs in vscode. One day I installed a server version of ubuntu in WSL for work and started using it. I installed/configured tmux, vim, and some other stuff, and now I can't get away from the terminal
>who uses postscript?
printers eternally btfo
Printers are sub-human.
It's 2019, nobody actually prints anything
@@Pumpkin-Link this comment really got better with age
I used troff decades ago. I tried to use groff a few years back and discovered I'd forgotten more about it than I ever knew! 😞 Maybe I should have another look.
The book, Unix in a Nutshell, is very helpful for GNU troff and over all with Linux as an operating system. I recommend reading it!
@@coolkiwi1581 Yes, I have it somewhere, along with old documentation about using troff. It's just finding the time ...
After seeing all of these (admittedly cool) typesetting tools, I can't help but appreciate Org-mode even more every time. It's so elegant and functional when editing/reading the plaintext, and it has all the necessary outputs as well, and can even be routed through Groff or LaTex for rendering. I think it'll be a very long time before something tops Spacemacs and Org-mode for me.
Sadly, Luke does not yet recognize the manifold blessings of Saint iGNUcious. In time he too will move to the GNU/Emacs operating system, or GNU PLUS EMACS as it is better known.
I read the second half of this in Stallman's voice and it honestly sounds like something he'd say.
@@MrGincone this better be ironic
Nah. Emacs is bloated af
@@Cobalt985 nice profile picture.
@@sebastianmestre8971 Emacs is as bloated as you make it.
Back in the 1980's one of the most popular word processors (on MS-DOS) borrowed the idea of "dot commands". It was called WordStar. My dad raved about it. I used a similar shareware program called Word Fugue while I was still at high school. I could touch type at the time, and remember dot commands being a very efficient way to work. Your fingers never have to leave the keyboard's home row.
Also slightly related, I discovered um this week. It's a note making tool for writing and then reading your own man pages in Markdown. They're converted to nroff automatically when you read them (so they really do work like man pages). Perfect for making notes about terminal-based software you're learning, and then quickly looking things up later. Available in the Arch AUR, and homebrew. Also on GitHub.
These videos are incredible. I installed arch, ran LARBS, and can follow exactly what's going on. Using groff now because I was to put off by laTex. Thanks for slinging great stuff like this. I haven't used windows or mac for two months now. They are almost completely unnecessary
Yeeeees more groff tutorials!!! There's tons of Groff text-based tutorials but nothing on youtube.
groff is ffrog backwards. Coincidence?
ffmpeg's arch nemesis
No, it's fforg
@@ethanjohn7638 shhh!
turning the groffs gay
BattleGroffs
Thank you for this. I'm writing an presentation in LaTeX/beamer. And one application I thought that groff could be useful is for producing the manuscript within the same LaTeX file.
This is done by piping the LaTeX file out to grep and awk to search for a certain keyword that contains text to be parsed by groff.
In that way, I produce the pdf that contains my manuscript from the same file as the presentation.
I had decided to learn troff. I never did it because I decided that at 3 am, and had forgotten about it the next morning... Thanks for reminding me!
Wow, I wish I'd known about groff when I was in university. It's beautifully elegant how you can script exactly the way you want your document formatted. The imprecise tools in Microsoft Word always set off my OCD.
to any multilingual humans. UTF-8 characters need to be escaped. You can just add `-k` to the groff command.
I don't know if I already made a comment about this, but grog is a useful wrapper that will guess which macros you are using.
By default it outputs the required command to standard output, but you can give it the --run argument to make it (unsurprisingly) run the command.
For example,
$ grog -Tpdf --run somedoc.ms > somedoc.pdf
Or,
$ grog -T pdf somedoc.ms
groff -T pdf -s -t -p -ms somedoc.ms
$ echo "Wow, thank you so much."
Groff - The Ultimate IHNIDWYGOWYS* Editor!
*I have no idea what you get or what you see
I love your content, because you pick subjects that none other talks about (or is hard to get).
Please continue with the good work.
Everything was fine until i wanted the ℝ symbol U211D. I got stuck when it got to fonts, i found some resources but didnt really was more involved than i had hoped. I love it otherwise. Thanks for introducing me to it! :D I'd love to see more on groff.
Cheers
Forget groff, use ed: “Ed is the standard text editor.” ?
Nice try
Well, what prevents you from writing roff (groff, neatroff etc) documents in ed?
Bravo, excellent video. I don't think I would've ever heard of this otherwise.
What in my life brought me to this moment?
jf brother this is dope
Autism
wtf I started learning latex TODAY and now I get to regret it? Thanks Luke
Yay I have been witing for this. Wanted to learn how to use it but was missing on understandable resources. Thank you Luke, you have been a positive force in my life.
Important! I was struggling to get "ääkköset" working (unicode support). The solution is to use the preprocessor *preconv* or groff -k! Do not waste your time trying to find the encoding for your language and setting it in your text editor, use preconv!
I'm not shitting you.
I'm translating an essay that i've written from my native language into English so i wanted to give it a shot writing it in mousepad and compiling it with pandoc. I've just started yesterday. And now you upload this ... oh well, i guess switching won't hurt.
its been three years, has your essay been translated yet
@@not_herobrine3752 lmao yeah but I didn't use groff
@0:55 Big does not necessarily mean bloated. You can either chose to install the whole texlive package or certain components.
Alright! A ‘86 CE grad from the UA who enjoys your videos here! Keep it up! Go Cats!!!!
Is it any good for math expressions, index gen, reference listing?
groff works with other unix utilities, the preprocessors I mention at the end of the video, to do just that. `refer` does references, `eqn` does math equations, etc.
Is there any minimal ms word Linux solution? Roughly 50% of my coworkers and my boss use word for papers. They rely heavily on the "follow changes " function. I would like to have a fully compatible Linux version. Preferably text only?
I could convince them to stick to latex/markdown.
How did you keep a straight face with how many times you said "PP"?
3:20 :filetype detect in vim
6:34 "soft breaks" in source help a lot in diff-ing them and other manipulations on them
8:51 "line initials"
That's very cool. I wish I had the need to type and compile something into neat
PDFs.
write a hit list
@@desktorp > glowing intensifies
@@thedragonrises6882 run me over with your dad's car
I still find RMarkdown easier to write than groff. Still Glad that Luke make tutorial on this tho.
Rmarkdown is Basicly just markdown + R code in it. Nothing special.
I don't know what happened with your video, but I like VHS Luke!
Nice video, gee-roff :) is a total discovery for me, thanks!
"I am a minimalist I don't like using all of those syllables"
One day you’ll come along to org-mode.
This feels like HTML for Microsoft Word. Intriguing! Eagerly awaiting for the next video on inserting pictures.♥
Me, a zoomer: This feels like gopher for LaTeX
thanks for the groff intro, saving me time already with lots of things.......
your panel is BLOTE
your comment is BLOTE
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bl%C3%B3t
muh minimalism
david esktorp You’re Dísablót
Question: Why did you pick the macro set you did? What are the advantages of one over the other? Thanks
I write all my documents in GNU ed.
Luke is using groff... what's next, heirloom troff?, then a video about the wonders of the Acme editor?
No, "ed" is the ultimate step
next videos -
Customizing groff/troff Macros and Other Basics - th-cam.com/video/kJ_TXZB4Gm4/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=LukeSmith
Your Brain Using REFER to do your bibliographies automatically in groff/troff - th-cam.com/video/yTQbi_E_Gys/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=LukeSmithLukeSmithVerified
cmd:
groff -ms sample.ms -Tpdf > sample.pdf
preprocess for refer
refer -p doc/bibliogragh sample.ms | groff -ms sample.ms -Tpdf > sample.pdf
-----------------------------------------
------ sample.ms----------------
-----------------------------------------
.SO macro.ms
.TL
title
.AU
author
.AI
college
.NH
num heading
.NH 2
num heading
.SH 2
no-num heading
.PP
paragraph
.[
book
.]
---- end -----------------------------
-------------------------------------
-------- macro.ms -----------
.de BL
.UL "under line text"
..
----- end ------------------------
tbh your most useful video to me was the markdown -> pdf with pandoc. It saved my butt for schoolwork.
I am here from the church of Emacs. Would you like to talk about text editing?
How long until Luke starts doing videos about how piston-fill fountain pens are vastly superior to cartridge fountain pens?
Attaching sound to a pdf!!!
I love your videos Luke, but please tell me. I might not have gotten the point. But how is this better than using a normal word processor? Damn you have to put the bold words on a separate line, you have to compile after every change. can't you automate that it compiles every 2 seconds or so? And what if it does not compile in a really big doc, How long does it take to find the mistake(s)?
If you want to autocompile, the lazier way would be to write a "while true" loop with the Groff command, or abuse the "watch" command, which you normally use to track the output of a command, but you can use it for this too.
watch -n 2 "groff -ms groff.ms -T pdf > groff.pdf"
2 is the waiting time between repeats and can be decimal (0.1) too.
The quotes aren't necessary in this case, but are needed in some esoteric case where bash can't figure out if an option flag is part of watch or the command you're trying to pass to watch.
I'm oh-so-much on your train, ever was, completely my flavor of minimalism/GNUism/Unixism/Whateverism, sometimes I think we know each other for years. I even wrote my own obituary in the terminal ;) No, seriously, compatibility FTW. Plus: I learn everytime something new & fascinating when I click on your channel.
If using groff to output html, would math equations etc. be formatted as image tags in the html (png perhaps?) or would it be something else like svg?
I'm interested in potentially using this to generate web pages. Currently I'm using a static site generator, but math equations require a javascript library as a dependency to render them on the client-side. I'd like to avoid that dependency if possible, and got for something more lightweight and unix-y.
WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU TO SEE THE LIGHT, LUKE. But why not -mom macros? The documentation is amazing, it includes vim settings, it's more powerful than -ms and easier to use.
Also, I'm sure you know, but you can use inline stuff for \f[I]italics\f[P] and \[B]bold\[P] . There's also a way to alias a blank line to .PP to make groff even easier to read.
Loads of documentation in /usr/share/doc/groff-1.22.3/ (for all macros) and info '(groff)ms' for -ms macros
Mom’s output to html is unreliable. It tends to delete parts of the input.
RS and RE "raise start, raise end" ??? Cuz indent is kinda like raising the text? It's a stretch, but it's how I'll remember it
Neatroff is a bit better, that is, if you arrange the binaries, fonts, macros and the scripts to call it all in a pipeline in a more convenient way. Add ghostscript and jfbview to it, et voila, you have purely console-based publishing system. And I'm not sure whether groff can be statically linked, I managed to do this for neatroff in Alpine Linux. Also, preparing custom fonts in neatroff is much less headache than with any other roff implementation.
I really never understood the whole thing with having a compiler for word processing and page layout aspects. I'm a big fan of efficiency, which is why I like the command line as a general rule, but when it comes to formatting of these sort of documents a WYSIWYG editor just seems sooo much more efficient.
because word processors are user-unfriendly and packed with a million features you'll never need. writing equations in word is a nightmare; in google docs it's a bit better because you can use some TeX instead of clicking all those little buttons, but it's still a nightmare. formatting paragraphs, headings, and such is difficult because you get one paragraph which is indented in a slightly wrong way, and no matter what you type or click it just won't be like the other paragraphs. or maybe you want to make a bulleted list, but you press enter one too many times and now you're "outside" the list and when you get back in the list the spacing is wrong. or maybe you just want the damn list to be indented to the same level as its surroundings but word automatically indents it for you and you can't "un-indent" it
Okay, stupid question here. Could I pretty much do all the same stuff that was done in the "vim" program with wordgrinder? Wordgrinder looks sexy.
Hey Luke, you may enjoy using pure TeX if you like groff.
Thank you Luke for interesting videos! I have one problem with this one to setup correctly. How do you get .ms document output to pdf with latin characters like Ö or Ä?
Run groff with the -k option. That will handle most Latin characters with diacritics.
@@LukeSmithxyz Thank you very much Luke! It worked like a charm!
Excellent stuff! Keep it coming. Presentations in Troff pls.
When I tried to export with the pdf and the second command `groff -ms groff.ms > groff.ps` | `groff -ms groff.ms -T pdf > groff.pdf`, I get errors like 'groff: can't find 'DESC' file
groff: fatal error: invalid device 'pdf''.
Has any one encountered similar issues ?
I recently started using Groff myself and am using the Mom macros. Have you tried that one? I find it to be a bit more complete than ms and yet still pretty small.
I'd love to take my notes in that format, is there support for formatting syntax?
Thanks a lot for this introduction to groff. Another hidden unix gem. A bit off topic: what terminal font did you use in this screencast? Wasn't able to find it in your dotfiles. Looks like Monaco, but with slightly different shapes.
Ok. It's Consolas with stylistic alternates. Looks very nice.
What is the reason you don't suggest editing in html/css, especially if you already know how to.
So I installed Groff then did vim Groff.ms and started typing. It was not number, wouldn’t let me type at first, switched file type and wouldn’t compile . What’s up?
hi dear luke ... i'm new to the subscriber ... i watched few of your videos and i have the pleasure to join your members community ... this is really the beauty of linux ... as much as it is basic as much as it is powerful and wonderful
Are you having a stroke?
@@auslegungssache are you having trolling issues
epic poo impression
@@mcclonei4907 ????
Now that you have discovered the comment section, welcome to the Luke Smith gang XD
Don't be afraid, it's their way to be friendly!
What do you do/use to create editable files? I.e. if you needed to send a draft to a professor/colleague for their direct comments? Would you still create a pdf in groff?
Thanks
Markdown seems to be more readable. I need latex anyway. Might as well just use markdown and pandoc instead of this. Anyways, nice to know about it.
How cool would it be if we could DIY an opensource dotmatrix printer that supported postscript and Latex
Terry A Davis went to University of Arizona. He wrote his own compiler. Until you write your own compiler, it’s an amateur project.
I don't see how this is better than LaTeX
This is the purest expression of chaddery I have ever witnessed.
Don't know many professors that will be happy without .doc or .docx. Can it convert or output .doc?
MIND BLOWN
How do you compile foreign languages in groff? I'm trying to make a pdf out of russian groff document, but all russian letters turn into glibberish. -T utf8 makes no difference either.
What do you think about AsciiDoctor ?
I went to install LaTeX on my laptop and the install was fraking HUGE and choose to bypass it
Instead of using abiword + Gnumeric and leafpad
Great info...
I'll test it in Cygwin...
or do you have another suggestion for using that tools inside Windows 10...
?maybe some GNU/other tools (for troff and PS/PDF compilation) i don't know about ! ;-)
i haven't used cygwin in a while but i like wsl. i use vcxsrv to run a headless x server in the background, and my terminal is powershell with a powerline font (for fancy prompt and status lines in tmux and vim). it works great but a bare metal linux installation would be ideal. i don't know if it exists but something like a server distribution with X windowing so that you can open windows from the command line, but there is no desktop - that would be it
So how do I make it show \int_{a}^{b}x^2dx$ ? (Quickly searches interweb... oh you already did a video on that).
Is groff any good for mathematical syntax and formatting?
Answer: YES!
Use eqn!
I use Windows stick notes. They sync across my devices. Yh, yh I prefer windows over Linsux and iToddlerOS.
How can i change header in groff?l
Edit:
Dont mind me i already get it
Are you still using it? Are you feel comfortable in the every day use?
Hello friend, you desktop looks cool. How do I make my windows desktop look like yours.
how to get line number in vim
I highly doubt you can do that on windows. It is a totally different window managing.
If you want an i3-like desktop, better use Linux or BSD.
Although I'm not entirely sure I know a distro with i3 -like DE as default, one can set one up with realitive ease at least on Arch.
(I personally use sway on Arch)
Ded this question belongs on Luke’s forum. Ask him about his forum.
I think Ded is telling a joke
@@opiniondiscarded6650 Nope, Windows File System is fucking terrible, give a try to any task that involves high IO and you will perceive a massive lag. Try zsh with "oh-my-zsh' under MSYS2 for example, is far from being usable.
I am really new to Linux so could you tell me why this is an advantage over something like a GUI text editor? You mentioned something about extensibility. Forgive my ignorance. Lol
Some people in linux just like typing fucking everything they do, basically. I can't see how this would be any quicker than me pressing enter or tab a few times to format things as i want them in a gui, but i guess some people have certain specific use cases (or mental problems) preventing them from using what we've all mostly accepted as a better way, lol. I keed, but yeah
hi every one i have problem i want use groff for persian but when i get output not good how can i fix this ?