From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: arnold@skeeve.com (arnold@skeeve.com) Date: Tue, 15 May 2018 08:23:34 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Who used *ROFF? In-Reply-To: References: <201805151252.w4FCq3Fx002374@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <201805151423.w4FENYlQ010613@freefriends.org> Clem Cole wrote: > We added a few Macro's to it for some books, but pretty much used it as it > is for basic documents. Janet Egan, Steve Talbot and someone else who's > name I've forgotten, wrote a wonderful "Masscomp Style Guide" for all the > books - I still have my copy. Tim took it with him when he created > O'Reilly. All of the original 'NutShell' books and the set that got the > O'Reilly empire started (the X11 stuff) was all Masscomp superset of -ms. They were still using this circa 1997; I did the update of sed&awk in troff, but by then O'Reilly had switched to DocBook. They converted the book to DocBook, but actually printed it by running it through some hairy perl scripts that turned it *back* into troff -ms + their additional macros! It was a mess, but eventually the book got printed. As an aside, they still use DocBook, but with a more rational printing engine. Nevertheless, something simple like: short Text text text text Text text text text long item here Text text text text Text text text text which troff handled with ease takes a lot of tweaking and style sheets and Heaven-knows-what-else to do in DocBook. Bleah. Arnold