[9fans] native lbl, long text in troff, bold italics in eqn

[9fans] native lbl, long text in troff, bold italics in eqn

[Rudolf Sykora]

Hello,

I have basically 3 questions:

1) is there a native lbl (for symbolic labels in text documents), or
do I have to grab the unix tarball and somehow compile that? (How?
Using APE? Never tried that before...)

2) I heard and read that the 'ms' troff macros are not suitable for
longer documents (I want to write my PhD thesis), as opposed
supposedly to the 'me' macros (which, however are not in plan9, I
believe). Can anybody give me their opinion?

3) Although eqn produces worse result than TeX, I like the way
formulae are input, and thus have used it. Sometimes I need bold
italics, which I achieve by overstriking. This isn't ideal, maybe
using a special bold italics font would be better. Has anyone thought
about this?

Thanks
Ruda

Re: [9fans] native lbl, long text in troff, bold italics in eqn

[Brian L. Stuart]

> 2) I heard and read that the 'ms' troff macros are not
> suitable for
> longer documents (I want to write my PhD thesis), as
> opposed
> supposedly to the 'me' macros (which, however are not in
> plan9, I
> believe). Can anybody give me their opinion?

There should be some macro packages out there that
fit particular universities' requirements.  If you
can't find one that's close to your needs, I think
I can find the one I did at Notre Dame, but you may
have to change things like chapter headings if you
have stricter requirements than ND had.  (I did have
stricter requirements at Purdue, but I used LaTeX
there).  Be forewarned though, this macro package
was written 25 years ago on troff running on 4BSD.
No guarantees that it'll work out of the box with
current troff on Plan 9.

BLS

Re: [9fans] native lbl, long text in troff, bold italics in eqn

[Charles Forsyth]

>2) I heard and read that the 'ms' troff macros are not suitable for
>longer documents (I want to write my PhD thesis), as opposed
>supposedly to the 'me' macros (which, however are not in plan9, I
>believe). Can anybody give me their opinion?

i don't see the problem. i've used -ms without fuss on dissertations.

Re: [9fans] native lbl, long text in troff, bold italics in eqn

[Charles Forsyth]

>There should be some macro packages out there that
>fit particular universities' requirements.

oh. if there were whacky requirements (i think the main one
for me was a now-obsolete requirement for 1.5 spacing) i tweaked
settings as required. it was fairly minor effort (and i don't
typically understand the internals of troff packages).

Re: [9fans] native lbl, long text in troff, bold italics in eqn

[Pietro Gagliardi]

On Sep 3, 2010, at 11:16 AM, Rudolf Sykora wrote:
> 3) Although eqn produces worse result than TeX, I like the way
> formulae are input, and thus have used it. Sometimes I need bold
> italics, which I achieve by overstriking. This isn't ideal, maybe
> using a special bold italics font would be better. Has anyone thought
> about this?
You should be able to embed troff directives in eqn:
	f( "\f(BIx\fP" ) = 4 sin "\f(BIy\fP"
worked for me.

Re: [9fans] native lbl, long text in troff, bold italics in eqn

[Rudolf Sykora]

Hello,
so what do you use for cross-references in troff documents under plan9?
Thanks,
Ruda

On 3 September 2010 17:16, Rudolf Sykora <rudolf.sykora@gmail.com> wrote:
> is there a native lbl (for symbolic labels in text documents), or
> do I have to grab the unix tarball and somehow compile that? (How?
> Using APE? Never tried that before...)

Re: [9fans] native lbl, long text in troff, bold italics in eqn

[jake]

> Hello,
> so what do you use for cross-references in troff documents under plan9?
> Thanks,
> Ruda
There's two versions of refer in contrib. One version is forsyth/refer.tgz,
which is just refer, 'slightly improved,' and the other version is
steve/refer, which is refer from forsyth with bin2ref and the plan 9
bibliography from the University of Utah. They can be installed with contrib.
Hope that's what you need.

Re: [9fans] native lbl, long text in troff, bold italics in eqn

[Rudolf Sykora]

> There's two versions of refer in contrib. One version is forsyth/refer.tgz,
> which is just refer, 'slightly improved,' and the other version is
> steve/refer, which is refer from forsyth with bin2ref and the plan 9
> bibliography from the University of Utah. They can be installed with contrib.
> Hope that's what you need.

If I understand, refer is primarily meant to manage bibliographical references.
I need cross-references within a document, like to pictures, pages,
figures, equations, ...  --- that's why I mentioned 'lbl' and asked
whether there is a native port. Or more generally, what others use. I
can't believe it'd be possible to write a longer document without
automatically managing such things.
Ruda

Re: [9fans] native lbl, long text in troff, bold italics in eqn

[Gregory Pavelcak]

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I think you would have to use two passes of troff. The first pass would
generate the info you needed to define the crossref macro.

For example:

.NH 2
Middle of Paper
.LP
.tm crossref: .if "\\\\$1"middle" see sec. \*(SN

I have the label 'crossref:' in case you are generating definitions for
several
macros, and you want to grep the standard error to treat different lines in
different ways. If you're using -mpm, for example, and you like running
heads
that change with section number changes, you need to use a method like
this to define a running-head macro. If crossrefs turn out to be the only
things
that need this treatment, you can obviously leave the label out.

Do a pass with troff -ms mypaper >[2]crossrefs.

So crossrefs will look like

.de CR
.if "\\$1"middle" see sec. 3.7
.if "\\$1"differentsection" see sec. 7.2.6
.
.
..

Then read in crossrefs on the next pass, and all of your refs in the doc
like
.CR middle
.CR differentsection
should work.

Putting thought into a text processing mkfile is probably worthwhile here.

Although it's another example of bibliographic references, Russ Cox once
posted some scripts using rc, awk and a mkfile that used this two pass idea.
It would probably be worth
looking at his example too. It's quite brief.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.plan9/browse_thread/thread/76ff0d3dc3c49e59/03bfa13f60f56900?lnk=gst&q=rsc+refs#03bfa13f60f56900


I think this is roughly right; I haven't used troff in a while. I'm sure
someone
else will chime in if there's an easier approach.

HTH

Greg


On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Rudolf Sykora <rudolf.sykora@gmail.com>wrote:

> > There's two versions of refer in contrib. One version is
> forsyth/refer.tgz,
> > which is just refer, 'slightly improved,' and the other version is
> > steve/refer, which is refer from forsyth with bin2ref and the plan 9
> > bibliography from the University of Utah. They can be installed with
> contrib.
> > Hope that's what you need.
>
> If I understand, refer is primarily meant to manage bibliographical
> references.
> I need cross-references within a document, like to pictures, pages,
> figures, equations, ...  --- that's why I mentioned 'lbl' and asked
> whether there is a native port. Or more generally, what others use. I
> can't believe it'd be possible to write a longer document without
> automatically managing such things.
> Ruda
>
>

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Re: [9fans] native lbl, long text in troff, bold italics in eqn

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On 10-09-16 9:41 AM, Gregory Pavelcak wrote:
> I think you would have to use two passes of troff. The first pass would
> generate the info you needed to define the crossref macro.

Also, take a look around troff.org. At the very least there should be a
link to Stevens' notes about typesetting the TCP books. I'm pretty sure
he talks about how he did index assist macros.

Re: [9fans] native lbl, long text in troff, bold italics in eqn

[Peter A. Cejchan]

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OT:
Ruda, if you are located in CZ, please, contact me at cej_at_gli_cas_cz,
(s/at/@/; s/_/./, of course)
it would be nice to have some plan9ist here, I sit at Prague. Thanks!

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