Re: [Groff] documentation on macro writing

[Jon Snader]

On Wed, May 29, 2002 at 07:53:44AM -0400, Larry Kollar wrote:
> > 
> > To have an ugly text version would be a good starting point.  All 
> > formatting can be added later on.
> 
> That's more or less what I was thinking -- text first, macro
> religious wars later. We could go ahead & code up things like
> tables, equations (if any), and pictures, since the commands
> don't change regardless of macro package.
> 
> As far as macros go -- reading in Chapter 4 last night, the
> authors said that they used a package written by Hayden Books
> (at the time, recently acquired by Sams), I'll assume that
> those aren't available unless somebody knows somebody. OTOH,
> looking at troff.org, several authors (hi Jon!) used modified
> versions of -ms to do the work. Just a couple of data points.
> 

The modified version of -ms that I use is essentially that of
Rich Stevens, and produces the format that he used in his books.
I'm not sure that's what we'd want for this project.

I'm inclined to think that it might make sense to settle on
(at least) a base macro package now.  That way it's easy to
do things like marking paragraph starts (.PP, e.g.) as we go
along rather than have to go back and insert them.  If we decided,
say, to use -ms, the transcribers could do most of the markup as
they went along.  Then we could go back and add in the special
stuff like .chapter to get a polished product.

I have some experience in writing custom macros, so I'd be glad
to help with that, if needed.

Jon Snader