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Comment by jff | Hacker News Reader

troff takes a little bit more work but it can put out some very nice-looking documents with a lot of control over the formatting and some pretty handy utilities for tables and math and such. For example, pretty much all the Plan 9 papers were written in troff: https://9p.io/sys/doc/

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Okay. I guess what I'm wondering is, if I'm already reasonably proficient in LaTeX (for documents where I want/need lots of control) is there an advantage to learning/using troff versus using markdown?

No two latex installations are the same.

> No two latex installations are the same.

Sure, but that doesn't address my question about whether I should use troff versus markdown for things where I don't need the power and complexity of LaTeX.

In my opinion, I'd say pull out troff if you're thinking about making a PDF, or if you want tables or equations (see http://www.troff.org/prog.html). Personally, I mostly use markdown when I want to generate some HTML but don't feel like typing tags by hand, or just as a sort of "style guideline" when writing text files.

I meant when in two years you add something to your tex file and make blows-up, that's a reason to use roff if you can get away with it.

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification. I guess I don't use very many "exotic" packages, so I haven't had much of an issue with old LaTeX files not compiling. Though, I also rarely have to go back and recompile them.

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