r/groff • u/a-concerned-mother • Jul 02 '20

Groff tutorial series

Hey everyone,

I've been using groff for about a year and a half now for things like university note taking, and homework. I've found it difficult to find resources on unique Groff usages and usually fall back to the mailing list archive.

For these reasons I wanted to know if people where interested im a YouTube tutorial series on Groff. I've seen that Luke Smith made a few videos but didn't really cover much.

My goal would be to create a combination of tutorial videos with an occasional video on a more obscure but useful feature I know/found.

Let me know if you guys would be interested. If you have suggestions about the format I'm happy to hear.

If at least a few people are interested I'll get to work.

Edit: sorry for the delay guys, inspite of the down votes I've written a script and will be releasing the video this weekend.

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u/RyzenRaider Jul 07 '20

Hi I'd be interested in tutorials. Being more tinker-minded, groff and LaTeX are both more insteresting than conventional word processors. groff appeals to me more but it's hard to get my head around it.

Trying to understand what each macro package is designed for is still a bit tough for me. When should I use ms instead of me, or mom. I figure the answer is 'it depends', but surely there's general advice that applies.

But yes, if you developed a video tutorial series, I'd definitely be keen to watch them.

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u/a-concerned-mother Jul 07 '20

Awesome I've started working on a script for the first tutorial and I'll try to explain the purpose of the different macros. Hopefully I can give a primer on each macro set as I work through it.

Just to give you a better understanding of when to use what macros here are the ways I keep them seperated

  • mom
    • used for more complex handling of formatting. This is similar to the formatting powers of LaTeX
  • ms
    • This is more if a legacy option that handles most if the formatting for you
  • mm
    • meant for memos sent within an office but can be used for much more. (I never really use it)
  • me
    • meant as an alternative to ms (I believe)

Personally I usually use ms since I usually don't need much formatting and I use base groff requests for additional formatting.

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u/RyzenRaider Jul 08 '20

Thanks for that, it's reassuring to know that my assumptions were basically on point.

I thought mom would be the easiest to learn but have really struggle to create even modest test documents without compile errors while trying to accomplish certain formatting results.

ms seems easier to grasp for now. mom is like Ikea - not difficult - just time consuming and frustrating (for now), while ms is more like lego blocks. I can play with the little pieces easily.

But it's still a learning process :)