gpresent VS neatroff

It's funny, I looked at the "Typesetting Mathematics -- User's Guide (Second Edition)" postscript document, and - at least with macOS' Preview - some big brackets are segmented (Neatroff brackets don't seem to do this, although I've seen it in other troff generated documents), and they even say this:

> Warning — square roots of tall quantities look lousy, because a root-sign big enough to cover the quantity is too dark and heavy

The solution is naturally to rewrite big roots as powers.

pic does seem close to Tikz, although I had to look in the GNU pic doco to figure out how to do colors. Even then, transparency didn't seem to be supported?

Heirloom actually looks the most useful/mature. At least the output looks pretty/someone cared enough to make the example files pretty, there's actual documentation. Limitations are still there (having to convert bitmaps to EPS?). I will say I'm at least slightly impressed by `gpresent`, which is like beamer (so for making presentations), and built-in hyphenation support.

I still don't get Neatroff. It's compatible with/implements a lot that Heirloom does, but then the font support is worse again? It's an impressive project though, the source is very readable, and RTL/LTR support. Less impressive is the lack of a license - I think it's ISC, based on a single comment, but who knows?

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A repository and a makefile are distinctly different than an installer. Random macro packages that may or may not be on GitHub are different than `tlmgr`. Piping stuff around and having to convert images is different than just one command. GUI editors. Example documents (like https://texample.net/). That is what I mean by ecosystem.

XeTeX outputs PDFs by default (granted, via xdvipdfmx), and can also include bitmaps directly (again, granted it needs graphicx or something). All TeX stuff isn't without it's warts, and seems overly complex (pdfTeX/XeTeX/XeLaTex/LuaTeX/ConTeXt, etc). But in practice, it kinda somehow just works (until it doesn't).

[0] https://github.com/rhaberkorn/gpresent

I recommend sticking with Groff. There are other implementations of Troff—some older (Heirloom Doctools), some newer (Neatroff)—but most of the documents you'll encounter in the wild will have been written with Groff in mind.

Plan 9 troff might work! It works with utf8 out of the box[0], and while I haven't used it for complex math typesetting, there is a command (eqn [1]) that was developed for it. I'd recommend Ali Rudi's port (neatroff [2][3]) for a minimalist implementation. There's also Heirloom Documentation Tools [4] which is an implementation of *roff-and-friends that uses Knuth's paragraph-at-once algorithm (instead of the original line-wise one) for typesetting, plus some other interesting features.

The authors of eqn wrote a paper about it: "Typesetting Mathematics" by Brian Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry. Kernighan also wrote two manuals (one in 1976 with a revision in 1992, and one in 2007 with updates for the Plan 9 version). [5].

[0] utf8 was developed by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike during the creation of Plan9. The entire OS is compatible. Story here: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utf-8_history

[1] http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/eqn

[2] https://github.com/aligrudi/neatroff

[3] PDF manual for neatroff: http://litcave.rudi.ir/neatroff.pdf

[4] https://n-t-roff.github.io/heirloom/doctools.html

[5] These (and more) can be found here: http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/troff.html