Re: [9fans] mm macro documentation

[Aharon Robbins <arnold@skeeve.com>]

The Tenth Edition manual doesn't cover MM because (I believe) the people
at Bell Labs Research didn't use MM; they used MS.

Back in the days before Calderra bloodied the name of SCO, when SCO
first made available "Personal Unix Licenses", among the things included
was System III.  The System III sources were available via The Unix
Historical Society (www.tuhs.org) to those who sent in a copy of the
license.  I paid a whopping $100 for such a license and have the System
III sources, which includes the document cited below.

I was able to make good use of it circa 1999 for the third edition of
O'Reilly's "Unix In A Nutshell" where I included full documentation of
the MM macros.  So, if you can find a copy of that book, you'll have
reasonable documentation.

The fourth edition dropped most of the troff coverage; I was able to
convince the editor to let me put in enough to make it possible for
people to write man pages. :-(  One Of These Days I'd like to take the
older material and make a "shortcut" called "Troff In A Nutshell" but
I don't know when I'll find the time.

I don't know what the legal status is of System III and thus of this
document.  Maybe someone can arrange for a copy of the document to "fall
off a truck" somewhere .... Sigh.

HTH,

Arnold

P.S. Would anyone care to volunteer as to the legal status of a PDF
version of the document?

> Date: Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:33:58 -0600 (CST)
> From: Benn Newman <newmanbe@sdf.lonestar.org>
> Subject: Re: [9fans] mm macro documentation
> To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
>
> The Tenth Edition manual doesn't have mm (in the second volume at least)
> and the troff manual only helps if one wants to make a new manual page (my
> start at one is at contrib/btdn/man/6/mm)
>
> To be more concrete, it would be nice to either have
> "MM - Memorandum Macros. D. W. Smith, J. R. Mashey, E. C. Pariser, and N.
> W. Smith, AT&T Bell Laboratories, June 1980." or mm(6). I suppose
> <http://inetsd01.boulder.ibm.com/pseries/hu_HU/cmds/aixcmds5/troff.htm>
> will do for now...
>
> I have started an index file of the various things in /sys/lib/tmac at
> contrib/btdn/doc/tmac -- if you have an account you can update it
> yourself, or you can email me corrections. Some of the things can probably
> be deleted, at least from the view of someone outside of Bell Labs. No
> offence to Arun N. Netravali, but are (complet cover)^.1127 needed?
> tmac.org is just a .so to /usr/lib/macros/org.
>
> And in case no one has noticed, the sources website doesn't work.
> --
> Benn Newman