There used to be a "purity test for programmers" which asked if you could solve the Towers of Hanoi using troff.<p>I wanted to get that point, so I learned enough troff to write a solution to Towers of Hanoi with it<p><a href="http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/troff-hanoi.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/troff-hanoi.txt</a>
Today Groff+ms it's easy:<p>groff -step -k file.groff > file.pdf<p>Groff+mom it's like Texlive for TeX.<p>The last one it's best suited for writers.<p>With Groff+ms you can typeset equations, letters and articles with a 486 and less than 50MB of used space.
It's a gem.
Postscript can be set with -Tps for Groff, it may be lighter on rendering.
The GV viewer opens both PDF and PS files.
I use the Heirloom Troff for my daily workflow: <a href="http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html" rel="nofollow">http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html</a>
Support for Unicode, OTF fonts, Knuth's algorithm for formatting paragraphs, etc.
I’ve wanted to learn the roff ecosystem since I learned W. Richard Stevens (RIP) used troff for his books. 25 years later it’s probably time to accept the fact that I won’t.