groff/troff: MUH MINIMALIST Documents

[@LukeSmithxyz]

URGENT! Read this: lukesmith.xyz/deletion

[@a0um]

It says “not found”

[@sjuvanet]

rip 404 nginx. pretty funny luke didn't custom nginx error code

[@wrvcn]

Instead of the "xyz/deletion" page, is the "xyz/updates/deletion" page the real one?

[@an2qzavok]

Plain text files is the next step, and you will be rediscovering pen and paper soon after that.

[@blackrastafarian]

Pictograph, anyone?

[@yimoawanardo]

blackrastafarian how about speaking and using your memory

[@blackrastafarian]

@@yimoawanardo i think emitting some sort of pheromone would be better.

[@stefanRastocky]

I think clay tables and straw are quite minimal. And summerian alphabet can be written using just the same shape!

[@fallingintime]

markdown

[@altaccount8749]

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

[@desktorp]

GNU Plus Luke Smith

[@probably9085]

No, Richard, it's 'Luke Smith', not 'GNU+Luke Smith'.

[@gayusschwulius8490]

*tips fedora*

[@pedrogonzalez5590]

@@xerneastrainer8111 Tips Debian

[@vodam6970]

@@pedrogonzalez5590 *wobbles my fat in respect*

[@sellus495]

Are you just procrastinating on writing your thesis?

[@samerickson3469]

@@thewooque Honestly relatable.

[@marksmod]

no

[@johannesberger8641]

@@thewooque 6 months? I'm 9 months in and still configuring ...

[@Maksfulliling]

Yes.

[@jangronwald40]

all of us will one day end up in this comment section

[@petewest3122]

groff > latex > R markdown > groff

[@ahmedbob423]

pen + paper > groff

[@tennicktenstyl]

Editing pdf binary when?

[@Shonicheck]

pdf is not a binary format though...

[@Solarplexus0]

Officially giving up investing anymore time learning your newest minimal doc editor meme

[@LukeSmithxyz]

The inevitable conclusion is just writing everything in plaintext and using `pr` to format for printing.

[@joseluisgerman1906]

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.

[@MrHatoi]

_groff - front-end for the groff document formatting system_ Well that's very helpful.

[@highiqlevelirlezfukkingcla6597]

>not writing your thesis by hand

[@romydrah5606]

Thanks, just rewrote my CV in groff. So much nicer than all that word processor nonsense.

[@Cobalt985]

@ass hole I just use Overleaf, makes it much easier to make emergency edits and work on computers that are not mine.

[@vinpiazzo801]

ass hole wow yeah so much more efficient and hassle free than using Google Docs, lemme tell ya

[@crix_h3eadshotgg992]

based af

[@HiPhish]

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.

[@desertdude540]

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).

[@senpie-i1f]

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

[@trafficcone3620]

No true minimalism is just thinking

[@AppalachianAcademics]

@@trafficcone3620 No, true minimalism is not thinking at all.

[@darukutsu]

​@@AppalachianAcademics.

[@davidmaxwaterman]

I wrote a paper at university in nroff, back in '85 or so.

[@safalpiya3759]

Can you recommended me some resources to learn groff? I can't seem to find them.

[@finnianquail8881]

@@safalpiya3759 troff.org

[@nekoill]

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 KZbin 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.

[@victornecromancer]

There's no better time to learn than now

[@hectorcanizales5900]

Are you on Linux rn ?

[@nekoill]

@@hectorcanizales5900 yup, why wouldn't I be

[@matyasmarkkovacs8336]

It's never late to learn something new, if you are interested.

[@harleyspeedthrust4013]

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

[@duffman6088]

Uncle Luke's manifesto when??

[@phillphall]

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

[@patrickmckowen1154]

Yeeeees more groff tutorials!!! There's tons of Groff text-based tutorials but nothing on youtube.

[@seanld444]

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.

[@GrahamAtDesk]

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.

[@shorthouse06]

>who uses postscript? printers eternally btfo

[@LukeSmithxyz]

Printers are sub-human.

[@Pumpkin-Link]

It's 2019, nobody actually prints anything

[@Cobalt985]

@@Pumpkin-Link this comment really got better with age

[@LukeSmithxyz]

The growing groff/troff playlist: kzbin.info/aero/PL-p5XmQHB_JRe2YeaMjPTKXSc5FqJZ_km

[@RajivLochanPanda]

Groff cannot replace LaTeX, Luke! I tried using groff ms to write a report. I struggled to insert images to my document, a topic which you have not covered in any of your Groff videos. Converting png images to .eps and inserting them using .PSPIC degraded my image quality with limited resizing and placement options. And the ps and pdf document thus generated becomes bloated in size too! Inserting png and pdf files in LaTeX document is such a breeze and the size of the pdf still remains minimal! Groff is great for minimalistic pure text documents in my opinion.

[@C6TTiX]

@@RajivLochanPanda Check out this link for an altenative: www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-01.html

[@alcesmir]

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.

[@cosmojg]

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.

[@g00zik97]

to me writing equations in groff is much simpler and much clearer than writing them in latex.

[@somercet1]

@@cosmojg SIle is a LaTeX clone you might want to look into.

[@Erel0]

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!

[@Clutter.monkey]

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.

[@Cobalt985]

I read the second half of this in Stallman's voice and it honestly sounds like something he'd say.

[@Cobalt985]

@@MrGincone this better be ironic

[@sebastianmestre8971]

Nah. Emacs is bloated af

[@Supertimegamingify]

@@Cobalt985 nice profile picture.

[@seanld444]

@@sebastianmestre8971 Emacs is as bloated as you make it.

[@apmcd47]

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.

[@coolkiwi1581]

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!

[@apmcd47]

@@coolkiwi1581 Yes, I have it somewhere, along with old documentation about using troff. It's just finding the time ...

[@oddbob6230]

groff is ffrog backwards. Coincidence?

[@bool2max]

ffmpeg's arch nemesis

[@ethanjohn7638]

No, it's fforg

[@decon-kh8hj]

@@ethanjohn7638 shhh!

[@parallel4]

turning the groffs gay

[@douwehuysmans5959]

BattleGroffs

[@timh6088]

Groff - The Ultimate IHNIDWYGOWYS* Editor! *I have no idea what you get or what you see

[@rationalraven8956]

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.

[@mhellden]

I love your content, because you pick subjects that none other talks about (or is hard to get). Please continue with the good work.

[@magnussorensen2565]

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.

[@mlshenhua1]

next videos - Customizing groff/troff Macros and Other Basics - kzbin.info/www/bejne/oXvChYuQd5l6o5Y&ab_channel=LukeSmith Your Brain Using REFER to do your bibliographies automatically in groff/troff - kzbin.info/www/bejne/r4W0k5yVesR6r9U&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 ------------------------

[@IrizarryBrandon]

Bravo, excellent video. I don't think I would've ever heard of this otherwise.

[@hectorcanizales5900]

to any multilingual humans. UTF-8 characters need to be escaped. You can just add `-k` to the groff command.

[@cunjoz]

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.

[@not_herobrine3752]

its been three years, has your essay been translated yet

[@cunjoz]

@@not_herobrine3752 lmao yeah but I didn't use groff

[@cannedeals]

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.

[@mitchell9959]

wtf I started learning latex TODAY and now I get to regret it? Thanks Luke

[@AlvinLee007]

This feels like HTML for Microsoft Word. Intriguing! Eagerly awaiting for the next video on inserting pictures.♥

[@magnusanderson6681]

Me, a zoomer: This feels like gopher for LaTeX

[@thomasblackwell9507]

Alright! A ‘86 CE grad from the UA who enjoys your videos here! Keep it up! Go Cats!!!!

[@Argletrough]

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."

[@KubrickFR]

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!

[@goolaguser3702]

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!

[@dersg1freak]

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

[@ys621]

What in my life brought me to this moment?

[@ys621]

jf brother this is dope

[@bravonews1827]

Autism

[@altEFG]

That's very cool. I wish I had the need to type and compile something into neat PDFs.

[@desktorp]

write a hit list

[@thedragonrises6882]

@@desktorp > glowing intensifies

[@desktorp]

@@thedragonrises6882 run me over with your dad's car

[@dkresponder]

Forget groff, use ed: “Ed is the standard text editor.” ?

[@rodrigosouto9502]

Nice try

[@amoledzeppelin]

Well, what prevents you from writing roff (groff, neatroff etc) documents in ed?

[@tigerfish66]

thanks for the groff intro, saving me time already with lots of things.......

[@rexevan6714]

I still find RMarkdown easier to write than groff. Still Glad that Luke make tutorial on this tho.

[@rexevan6714]

Rmarkdown is Basicly just markdown + R code in it. Nothing special.

[@timothyvandyke9511]

How did you keep a straight face with how many times you said "PP"?

[@shapkofil4708]

"I am a minimalist I don't like using all of those syllables"

[@bruno1807]

Is it any good for math expressions, index gen, reference listing?

[@LukeSmithxyz]

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.

[@yash1152]

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"

[@mitchellsnaith6373]

One day you’ll come along to org-mode.

[@alenygam6048]

tbh your most useful video to me was the markdown -> pdf with pandoc. It saved my butt for schoolwork.

[@Omnihil777]

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.

[@worldhello1234]

@0:55 Big does not necessarily mean bloated. You can either chose to install the whole texlive package or certain components.

[@falafelfajt]

Luke is using groff... what's next, heirloom troff?, then a video about the wonders of the Acme editor?

[@andruwne802]

No, "ed" is the ultimate step

[@KingHerring]

your panel is BLOTE

[@LukeSmithxyz]

your comment is BLOTE

[@desktorp]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bl%C3%B3t

[@duffman6088]

muh minimalism

[@red13emerald]

david esktorp You’re Dísablót

[@pierrepirault9136]

MIND BLOWN

[@ali-om4uv]

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.

[@whatthef911]

I write all my documents in GNU ed.

[@timelesstrance3720]

Attaching sound to a pdf!!!

[@mkaeterna9161]

This is the purest expression of chaddery I have ever witnessed.

[@MarekKowalczyk]

Excellent stuff! Keep it coming. Presentations in Troff pls.

[@philiprhome3824]

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

[@auslegungssache]

Are you having a stroke?

[@philiprhome3824]

@@auslegungssache are you having trolling issues

[@mcclonei4907]

epic poo impression

[@philiprhome3824]

@@mcclonei4907 ????

[@KubrickFR]

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!

[@robertbower9862]

Question: Why did you pick the macro set you did? What are the advantages of one over the other? Thanks

[@fryersoncaptain]

How long until Luke starts doing videos about how piston-fill fountain pens are vastly superior to cartridge fountain pens?

[@Aaron-cr5rx]

I'd love to take my notes in that format, is there support for formatting syntax?

[@grimm_]

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.

[@harleyspeedthrust4013]

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

[@finndriver1063]

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

[@Knirin]

Mom’s output to html is unreliable. It tends to delete parts of the input.

[@KatarDan]

I am here from the church of Emacs. Would you like to talk about text editing?

[@hugod1773]

dromff btfo

[@senantiasa]

OMG, I love this!!!!!! Thanks a lot!

[@victornikolov537]

Nice. I expect the next one tomorrow :D

[@amoledzeppelin]

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.

[@stefanmajonez6571]

Hey Luke, you may enjoy using pure TeX if you like groff.

[@eugeniogonzato]

What do you think about AsciiDoctor ?

[@yimoawanardo]

I actually like this

[@timothyvandyke9511]

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

[@user-he4ef9br7z]

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.

[@ihateit56]

I'll push like just for the thumbnail.

[@broquestwarsneeder7617]

looks really cool

[@gavinvales8928]

YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH BOOOOOOOOOOOOIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

[@axelfoley133]

7:10 the pee pee command lol. You make me wet myself.

[@chudchadanstud]

I use Windows stick notes. They sync across my devices. Yh, yh I prefer windows over Linsux and iToddlerOS.

[@ramysami]

What is this desktop and how you use it?

[@Mizar88]

I don't see how this is better than LaTeX

[@itdepends604]

What is the reason you don't suggest editing in html/css, especially if you already know how to.

[@AzVidsPro]

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)?

[@NostraDavid2]

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.

[@aerialdude]

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.

[@only4win708]

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?

[@LukeSmithxyz]

Run groff with the -k option. That will handle most Latin characters with diacritics.

[@only4win708]

@@LukeSmithxyz Thank you very much Luke! It worked like a charm!

[@moribundmurdoch]

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.

[@adrianperez8695]

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.

[@sujeewa8067]

Geez thanks man!

[@mohammadesmaili7716]

hi every one i have problem i want use groff for persian but when i get output not good how can i fix this ?

[@VictorE1030]

Thank you!

[@BurgerKingNationalist]

Hello friend, you desktop looks cool. How do I make my windows desktop look like yours.

[@LukeSmithxyz]

how to get line number in vim

[@saburokobayashi1574]

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)

[@Clutter.monkey]

Ded this question belongs on Luke’s forum. Ask him about his forum.

[@altaccount8749]

I think Ded is telling a joke

[@diogofelix8626]

@@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.

[@charliebrownau]

How cool would it be if we could DIY an opensource dotmatrix printer that supported postscript and Latex

[@burniehutjrs]

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

[@tomtomtomtom691]

Terry A Davis went to University of Arizona. He wrote his own compiler. Until you write your own compiler, it’s an amateur project.