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What do we think of groff+eqn as an alternative to the bloated LaTeX typesetting system?
It's fulfilled all my needs as an undergrad as of yet in just under 225KB compared to the 2.6GB of data pulled in when installing the texlive meta package on Arch.
Nov 17 · 4 weeks ago · 👍 mimas2AC, greg
🐸 chilledfrogs · Nov 17 at 16:05:
I personally use Neatroff instead of TeX, imagine Neatroff as the XeLaTeX of Troff, very happy with it for a few years now
@chilledfrogs Thanks for the recommendation. A cursory glance makes it seem promising. However, the latest package in the AUR is from 2020 and fails to compile...
🐸 chilledfrogs · Nov 17 at 16:59:
Yeah don't bother with the package, it's easy and very quick to compile from source and symlink to your ~/bin/ or equivalent
That's what I ended up doing. Will give it a go when I have some more free time to move over.
Another alternative is Plain TeX (if you can get it to install only the necessary files; texlive package has many more files than should be needed though).
Groff with the mm macros is my go-to for all things typesetting.
I used it for my Bachelor's thesis (sadly it had only one formula in it, so not much reason to use `eqn`), with a bit of glue code that allowed me to manage references with `jabref`.
Currently I mostly use it to generate invoice PDFs for my freelance work, and to build the occasional PDF presentation.
I wish I had more opportunities to use it though.
when I think permacomputing, I find presentation of text to be way out of bound. text only or less should be in permacomputing.
@daruma how would you go about formatting Mathematics in that case? Also, you can compile TeX and troff documents to PostScript which is a plaintext format.
🐸 chilledfrogs · Nov 18 at 15:12:
Another reason why I recommend Neatroff in particular is its better (TeX-inspired) handling of math with neateqn
@apk What I mean is that woth my understanding of permacomputng being that it isn't so much the concept of low powered computing but the ability and concept of using computer on a timeline of hundreds of years instead of 5 to 20 some years. How do we build computer and technology that will defy the challenge of time... So I find the problem of displaying documentation or formating text to be not so related to the concept of permacomputing. If someone were to find a computer 500 years after human disappeared from the earth and the machine could still be run. In this ideology, how you would represent mathematical equation or harder to display information would simply be dine with paper and ink.