Comparing TeX and Roff

[Paul De Bra]

In article <1269 at etive.ed.ac.uk> sam at lfcs.ed.ac.uk (S. Manoharan) writes:
}
}A few weeks ago there was an article on the net asking to compare
}both TeX and roff.
}
}I tried to learn both and observed the following:
}...
}   The disadvantage I found with TeX was there is
}   no way to get a readable output of the TeX file on an 
}   ordinary line-printer. [ Laser prints cost $$$s as well as time,
}   and hence are no joke ] A "detex" tool to strip the TeX commands is
}   available but it does not produce readable output on the
}   line-printer/terminal.
}
If you mean the real (expensive) lineprinters you are correct, but I assume
you mean ordinary cheap dot-matrix printers, for which drivers for Tex are
available. They do in general print very slowly, but produce very nice
results compared to nroff.

>PS:   Is there any tool to translate roff text to latex text
>or vice versa??  [ I have a code ( crude! ) to translate roff to
>latex but that works only for selected macros of ms package ]

I have given some explanations in an earlier posting as to why it is
impossible to translate troff to tex or latex. The existing tools handle
a small part of troff, and most of the common macro-packages and preprocessors.
But not the raw troff. Vice versa is also not available. But there exists
a dvit Tex-dvi output to ditroff-dvi output converter. So you can use the
same troff printer drivers with tex. (Don't know if that's PD).

Paul.
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