A Bulletin Board from the backside of the internet

sizeofcat wrote: ↑Sat Aug 03, 2024 4:36 pm The outcome is the realization that I can do pretty much everything I do on a current machine, on a 2009 machine.

Yes, that was one outcome for me as well. If a 2007 vintage netbook with its atom processor and mechanical drive can just about marginally run an up to date Firefox, then a core duo with discrete graphics card and a few Gig of ram should be screaming.

My detailed outcomes were more to do with skills; I have spent a week plus a few days extra in groff working with 6000 words of text, a few diagrams and half a dozen tables. So I have explored the classic pre-processors such as pic, eqn, tbl and grap. It has dawned on me that I can describe quite complex diagrams in grap/pic and then run them through groff to get ps files then convert those to eps, load into something like inkscape and export in a variety of formats.

In addition I have become a lot more fluid with vi. I'm *almost* thinking in vi now, but not quite.

Well, I finally got the actual piece finished.

http://www.k58.uk/pages/occ24/#finished

Deliverables

• One text file called sp.ms that has the troff mark up for 14 pages of text with mathematical formulas, tables, diagrams and graphs.

• One pdf file called t.pdf which is the result of processing the text file with a full installation of groff (GNU troff) with the additional install of the grap pre-processor.

I'm quite pleased with this and I think groff is quite a useful typesetting alternative.