History of roff

There used to be a &quot;purity test for programmers&quot; 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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loyalty.org&#x2F;~schoen&#x2F;troff-hanoi.txt" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loyalty.org&#x2F;~schoen&#x2F;troff-hanoi.txt</a>

Today Groff+ms it&#x27;s easy:<p>groff -step -k file.groff &gt; file.pdf<p>Groff+mom it&#x27;s like Texlive for TeX.<p>The last one it&#x27;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&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;heirloom.sourceforge.net&#x2F;doctools.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;heirloom.sourceforge.net&#x2F;doctools.html</a> Support for Unicode, OTF fonts, Knuth&#x27;s algorithm for formatting paragraphs, etc.

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What is groff&#x27;s hyphenation format? I see that it has hyphenation data only for a handful of languages (not including mine).

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.