🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1109@wpg.UUCP> russ@wpg.UUCP (Russell Lawrence) writes:
>I've just started working with troff and would like to become more
>adept at writing/changing macros.  Could someone recommend a few good
>books and articles?  Thanks.

Well... The manuals you get with modern versions of troff are sometimes
well worth a look.  The best version of troff I've come across for writing
macros is SoftQuad's sqtroff.  This has long macro names, and fairly good
debugging support.
You could also look at elan troff, which has good manuals, but which (unless
you are an OEM) is more expensive.

If you're stuck with whatever troff you've got...
Here are a few books.

Also, the changes I made to titroff (1986?) are still in the sources
archives, and may give you better error messages.

All of the books I have read on troff have errors in them, especially in
the area of tabs and leaders (rows of dots ................ ).

Dougherty, Dale & O'Reilly, Tim: UNIX Text Procesing
Hayden Books, Indianapolis, 1987 0-672-46291-5, 665pp
Probably the best of its kind.  Well worth it!

Barron & Rees: Text processing and typesetting with Unix
Addison-Wesley, 1987 0-201-14219-9, 447pp
I don't have this book.

Emerson, Sandra & Paulsell, Karen: troff Typesetting for Unix Systems
Prentice-Hall, 1987, 0-13-930959-4, 359pp
Not as good as Hougherty & O'Reilly's book, although it does give some info
about good old titroff.

Gehani, Narain: Document Formatting and Typesetting on the Unix System
Silicon Press, 1986 0-9615336-0-9
This really concentrates on using the -mm macros and the Documenter's
Workbench.  The version described is only availably internallyt within AT&T,
however, so there are a few pitfalls.

There were also a couple of papers in vol. 2A of the Unix manuals distributed
with 7th Edition Unix, and included with other systems (BSD, Sun, Sequent...),
but not System V [maybe you can buy the pages individually? :-)]

Ossanna, Joseph F.: Nroff/Troff User's Manual
Possibly the densest documentaion I've ever seen -- every comma counts!

Kernighan, Brian W.: A Troff Tutorial
Not many tutorials would say:
    [you can produce this...]
    by typing in only this:
    .sp
    \b'\(lt\(lk\(lb' \b'\(lc\(lf` x \b'\(rc\(rf' \b'\(rt\(rk\(rb'
and get away with it!  When you can understand this paper and the examples
Osanna gives, most of the books on the market won't help very much...
You will have to learn more by
* reading the source
* looking at the output of eqn (especially), tbl and pic
* looking at things like chem
* posting questions to comp.text :-) :-)

We do macro-writing and courses, so I have some macro examples intended for
teaching, but they mostly use sqtroff, with \*[long-names], so I don't have
to deal with `programs' that look like bird-droppings, as one net-wit put it.

I might be persuaded to mail/post some of these if you want.  They do
things like stacks, nested bullet-lists, balanced double columns, etc.

Lee
lee@anduk.co.uk

--
Lee Russell Quin, Unixsys UK Ltd, The Genesis Centre, Birchwood,
Warrington, ENGLAND, WA3 7BH; Tel. +44 925 828181, Fax +44 925 827834
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