Actually, I've never heard of nroff/troff. Maybe I'm too young.bob wrote:used to be nroff/troff. Then Knuth came long with tex/latex. Both are no longer used very much nowadays since we have things like openoffice and such tat provide WYSIWYG type document preparation.LarsA wrote:When I graduated from university a couple of years ago, everything was written in .tex, and had been so for a long time. (This was in europe)sje wrote:There's a lot to be said for plain ASCII text.bob wrote:I will try to get both that and my dissertation scanned. My dissertation was written using "interleaf" and before I knew it, the electronic version was unusable due to changes to interleaf over the years. Be nice to have that back in a text form as well...
Perhaps today's students are using HTML for their papers. There's so much communal inertia in the basic HTML text and diagram features that I expect the format to be readable a half century from now.
PDF is another format that I expect to have a long life. It's certainly taken hold in the Mac community and also with Linux users. It's the standard export format for material produced with Pages; that's the semi-pro document processor application on the Macintosh. I use it when I have to have embedded tables or images.
In earlier days, and there were many of these earlier days before mice and bitmapped displays, I used good old Emacs and nroff/troff.
Personally I feel the separation of content and layout in tex/latex liberating when writing longer texts.
