Re: [9fans] mm macro documentation

["Benn Newman" <newmanbe@sdf.lonestar.org>]

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

Which I use most of the time, but for some sets of documents, I use mm.

> 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.

That is what I printed out, it is not complete though (e.g. it doesn't
document the macros for letters) and it is not in every one's favourite
man(6).

> 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.

Good for you. :)

> 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?

Caldera released 32-bit 32 UNIX and 16 bit UNIX Versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,
and 7 under the four clause BSD license, see contrib/forsyth/refer.tgz.

>> 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
>
-- 
Benn Newman