Re: [Groff] groff_ms.man

[P. Alejandro Lopez-Valencia]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Larry Kollar" <address@hidden>
To: "P. Alejandro Lopez-Valencia" <address@hidden>
Cc: <address@hidden>
Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2002 4:24 PM
Subject: Re: [Groff] groff_ms.man


>
> "P. Alejandro Lopez-Valencia" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > > Larry has rewritten groff_ms.man.  It is now in the CVS.  Enjoy!
>
> > got around to grab a copy. There is no mention of the .XP macro -- so
useful
> > for bibliographic citations, nor the composite-glyph accent macros
> > (including the differences when using the .MA definitions).
>
> Are those new commands? I don't remember seeing it in the documents
> I pulled together. Oh well, I'll check out the source code & see what
> else I'm missing....

Hmm... Those are from the BSD additions in the mid-80's. I have that
document somewhere... Ahh, yes! 21.msdiff dated 02/06/1986, copyrighted
1983. It is part of the USD (User Documentation)  for BSD 4.2 (there is an
online copy at http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/system/usrdoc/usd/). It should
be in the USD for FreeBSD and OpenBSD as well. Soo.. .MA, the autonumbering
footnote macro, the indexing and TOC macros and other goodies such as the
.XP macro all came from Berkeley.

And as groff ms is based on BSD 4.3 ms minus UCB's thesis mode, and BSD ms
is AT&T ms enhanced and without the office and budget code beaurocratic
stuff used at Bell Labs...

>
> > And... What about a list of the out-of-the-box accents and symbols and
how
> > to type them? Something like a groff_symbols.7 man page. (I might be
willing
> > to write it myself, notice the use of non-commital future tense).
>
> That should also be added to groff.texinfo -- I think there's a
> placeholder section for it, but it hasn't been written yet.
>

Hmm... I can look into it. I haven't written a *roff macro in a decade sooo,
it will take a while to get up to speed. texinfo hasn't been my thing either
but there is always a first time for everything. (All my keyboards have
always had the @ key in a place that gives me hand cramps, even those Wyse
80's when we finally stopped punching cards...  ;)

>
> For that matter, all *roffs are missing a definition for the
> ellipses (...) -- I sent a further groff_ms.man patch to Werner
> that contains a definition:
>
> .ie |\*(.T|ps| .char \(el \fS\N'188'
> .el .char \(el .\|.\|.\&

Hmm... I just saw and the native ellipsis is not there in the PS metrics
files. I suppose that's "by design".

> Only the PostScript S (Symbol) fonts have it defined. Seeing
> how it's used in the Synopsis of most manpages, it really ought
> to be more readily available.

I think they should come from the actual text font, but considering the
situation, that's better than nothing.