The Groff Mission Statement looks interesting. http://www.gnu.org/software/groff...

danieldk · on Feb 22, 2015

The question is - do we really need the typesetting part? I had a troff phase (bought some books) ten years ago. But the community of users is small, its capabilities are eclipsed by TeX, and the language is quite arcane.

One could even go a step further and argue that writing man pages would be much easier (and presumably more man pages would be written) if the markup language was switched to e.g. Markdown by default. For my own software, I am already using Pandoc to generate nroff input from Markdown.

cogburnd02 · on Feb 23, 2015

> do we really need the typesetting part?

I think so; producing high-quality printed manpages is useful, at least to me.

> the community of users is small

So tell your friends to use groff! :-D

> its capabilities are eclipsed by TeX

In what way? Yes, TeX can do complex mathematics better, but most documents that people want to publish don't terribly need complex math that much.

> and the language is quite arcane.

What specifically is 'arcane' about it, versus something like TeX or markdown?

> One could...argue that writing man pages would be much easier...if the markup language was switched to e.g. Markdown by default.

But then someone would have to rewrite the existing corpus of manpages, and as others have pointed out, using markdown loses some semantics.

I think keeping that functionality in pandoc is the right way to go.