Manchester LUG Meeting 20th November

[(Ted Harding) <nospam [at] nessie.mcc.ac.uk>]

Hi Folks,

I'm reposting (below) information about the next meeting of
the Manchester Linux Users Group.

As well as the talk, the following will (may) be available
as goodies:

I have received a copy of EasyLinux (2 CDs), and the usual
short straw technique will be used to select a lucky winner.

Robert Baskerville and John Heaton have been downloading the
very recently released Corel Linux (based on Debian) and
looking into making CDs of it. Possibly some may be available
at the Meeting.

Looking forward to seeing you all on Saturday,

Ted.

============================================================

The next meeting will be on

Saturday 20th November 1999 at 14:00
Manchester Computing Building
Lascelles Williams Training Room

A summary follows.

-------------------------------------------------------------

35 Years of ****OFF!!

Groff and the History of Computing, UNIX, Linux and everything

Speaker: Ted Harding

Groff is the current GNU implementation of the UNIX text
formatting software 'troff'.

Without troff there would have been no UNIX; without UNIX
there would be no Linux. Troff and groff span the history
of our favourite system.

The origins go back further -- to RUNOFF on CTSS in 1964.
UNIX was independently conceived in 1969, but roff, the
port of RUNOFF to UNIX, was the first major application
to be developed; and it was what sold UNIX to Bell Labs.

Groff/troff is considered by many to be a dinosaur, only
suitable for formatting traditional man-pages (which is why
it is in the base package on Linux systems). However, this
is unfair -- it is powerful flexible document preparation
software which is well up to even modern Desktop Publishing
demands (many of the O'Reilly computing books are typeset
using groff, for instance).

The talk will survey the history and the capabilities (partly
on a technical level) of groff, and contemplate its future.
Along with Werner Lemberg in Dortmund, I am now one of the two
new maintainers of the groff package, and we have plans ...

Of recent years, TeX and packages such as LaTeX developed
on TeX have largely displaced groff/troff for scientific
and technical documents, and are used even non-technical
publications. TeX and groff will be compared, and reasons
for this shift discussed. The comparisons do not always
clearly favour TeX ...

-------------------------------------------------------------

All are welcome
Ted.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding [at] nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Date: 17-Nov-99 Time: 13:32:21
3839259 seconds left
------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

Start your own FREE mailing list at

&copy; 2000 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved