Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book

["John E. Gwyn" <JEGwyn@compuserve.com>]

"James A. Robinson" wrote:
> ...  The only other book I've seen which talks about troff is The
>  UNIX Programming Environment, and I'm interested in seeing what
> others have to say about the troff/tbl/eqn/pic typesetting
> environment.

There have been several books on the Documenter's WorkBench (DWB),
which is the name AT&T used for the separately licensed package of
troff and associated tools.  You can license the latest version
(3.1 I think) although it's a bit pricey for personal use.  There
were papers in the Bell Labs CSTR series describing most of these
tools, and the papers are available on-line.  The current Research
version of most of those tools is bundled into Plan 9 Release 3,
also available under a free license on-line, and the Plan 9
documentation includes user guides for some of them (and UNIX-style
manual pages for all).  The GNU project has some independently
developed troff-workalike tools ("groff" etc.) which are freely
available.

http://www.unipress.com/toolkit/dwb.html	Lucent/Unipress DWB
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/		Bell Labs Plan 9
http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/groff.html	GNU troff (groff)

I use DWB (2.0 plus local improvements) for my own technical
documentation.  You need to be aware that it is meant to be used
primarily as a set of specialized programming languages, not via a
graphical user interface (although interactive drawing tools do
exist).  In many ways it is similar to Knuth's TeX.  Its main
advantage over nearly all GUI-based formatters (Word, etc.) is its
relative lack of presumptions about the way you want your document
formatted.  For example, it does not insist on modeling all text
as characters packed into lines; you can place any character
anywhere on the page, including overstriking other characters.
The programmability is largely tamed via macro packages (much
like with TeX), most often the "MS" or "MM" packages, provided
with DWB.  One of the things I like most about DWB is the ability
to easily create specialized preprocessors to build graphs, etc.
which can be done within Makefiles, for example.