I was even writing good old roff a few days ago. So this book is not even out of date.
Just curious, what was it for? :)
PS: I had a groff based CV (2006-ish). Now it is a LaTeX based CV.
EDIT: Wanted to say, tbl nailed it for me that whatever conveniences WYSIWYG formatting might offer, it is never a good substitute for typesetting (a strong opinion to this day -- I still prefer typesetting for documents that need to 'travel')
And yes the letter(heads) came rather nice too.
troff and friends were developed on Unix in its early days by the originators of Unix and it shows in what a good fit they are to the environment and in their elegance; they are Unix programs. TeX was born outside of Unix; it runs on Unix.
Also, do you find yourself writing your own macros much? I haven't the faintest idea what that would require with troff, but I rely on this with TeX quite a bit, mostly to elevate stylistic markup into semantic markup. My impression is that if you want semantic macros you use a macro package, and even then you probably freely intersperse non-semantic macros.
This project I've been working on for a while, uses LuaTeX so that I can connect to a local database, perform some queries and typeset them and their output. I imagine this kind of thing would not be difficult to do directly with a custom pipeline step using troff. Have you done that kind of thing before? If so, how unpleasant was it?
Thanks for talking with me about this.
I do write my own macros. They can be just short-hands for a combination of others in the same way my ~/bin/l is exec ls -l "$@", or sometimes for a simple document I start with just troff and have some macros on top of that. Yes, any distinction over semantics is purely convention.
You may wish to read Kernighan's _Nroff/Troff User's Manual_, http://troff.org/54.pdf, otherwise known as CSTR #54. It's original troff, not groff, but as a succinct reference with elegant prose we often refer back to it. At the end is a tutorial introducing simple macros.
Integrating troff and friends in pipelines and scripts is easy. They take line-based text as input and produce it as output, only switching to binary for some output formats at the last hop. You can also run system(3) from within troff documents, e.g. to include the output of a command, but often that's not the easiest fit.
I recommend again the groff@gnu.org list; they're friendly, patient with newcomers, and interested in showing how they tackle the task at hand.
Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions! I will plough through some of this documentation and make my way over to the list.
A lot of my forays into programming started with the Bell Labs books (with troff | pic | eqn ...) prominently on the copyright page. So, it was one of the first things I looked up when I got access to a UNIX terminal. Then I discovered that all the UNIX books by Stevens were done up with troff/groff. From there, it was all "steadily downhill" for me ;-)
P.S: If you already know (La/Con)TeX then groff is literally a walk in the park. And it is always good to know more than one way to do things imho. Good luck with it.
I got a book on TeX coming soon because I want to get better at ConTeXt. ConTeXt is not shy about telling you that for better results you need to understand TeX and use it appropriately. I find it kind of absurd that I've been using TeX for so many years without actually understanding it.
I have been curious about roff since trying to use Plan 9, but in a pretty absent-minded way. They're quite unashamed of providing roff at the expense of TeX, and I believe all of its documentation is roff-formatted, including the technical reports, but I could be mistaken about that.
Handing it over to someone else to maintain is a different thing though. Products like InDesign or PageMaker or Word understand that this is what eventually happens in reality. So, the not-so-steep learning curves that WYSIWYG tools offer have won out in the end.
If the manual is written by techies, and maintained in-house like all those old Bell Labs manuals that used troff, then markup based typesetting is not such a pain, imho.
My first CV was in (gasp!) MS-Word. ;-)
Then I did a groff one for larks, and was a bit surprised at how well it was received (Wow! how "professional" it looks), and can they please have the "original doc file" for their own modifications. Sent them the source/text file only to receive the rather "sailory" emails that came back. :-D
Then I recovered.
Sometimes it's better if ideals are replaced with pragmatism - I achieve a lot more than I used to.