troff

Heirloom troff is descended from Sun’s troff, and focuses on nice typesetting supporting various PDF and OpenType features.

Plan 9 troff is, well, Plan 9’s troff, and is used by plan9port to render its own manpages.

There are a few other troff implementations (Neatroff, etc.), but these are the most widely distributed ones these days.

Modern manpages should be written in mdoc(7), another troff macro set that’s both more semantic and more expressive than man(7).

All major troff implementations support the -mdoc macros, though, and -mdoc is much better suited.

Twitter is a greater conceptual leap over blogging than TeX is over troff.

If Debian would put heirloom troff in its base-install (along with, say, E.

I'm very old school, I still prefer troff over latex but I'll take either over word because of version control.

Because the troff format was designed with the limitations on early 70's computers in mind and seem to be used exclusively for man pages.

There was also a pretty neat mouse-enables editor called 'jim' and I seem to remember a sort of troff previewer.

Does markdown have macros equal in power to those of troff?

There are a couple of other troff implementations in use today.

Unlike the others, it’s not a complete troff implementation; it focuses on manpages (“mdoc”, “man”, “eqn”, and “tbl” macro sets).

It wasn't free for universities, but in the first half of the 90s, SGI offered so-called "Varsity" contracts, which was basically a campus license for OS updates and unbundled products like compilers, NFS/YP and the "Documenter's Workbench" (a fancy name for troff/nroff).