🚀 go-pugleaf

These are the most common questions about mod.recipes, and their answers.

* What macro package do these recipes use? What text formatter? I've
  tried troff -ms and troff -mm and other troff options and nothing works.

    The recipes use a combination of the "man" macro package
    and their own special macros. All of the troff macros and
    shell scripts that you need to print the recipes are
    distributerd as part of the "software package" in the
    automatic quarterly posting; you can also retrieve the software
    from the archive system (see below).


* I have the software all installed, but the index seems to be terribly
  broken. Everything else works fine; what is the matter with the index?
  The recipe titles are coming out in random order, with the words
  interchanged, and there are no page numbers. Help!

    The index is not broken; you just don't know how to read it.
    The recipe software uses the same kind of index that the
    Unix manuals use. In fact, the recipe index is generated
    using the same program that generates the index to the Unix
    manuals.
    
    This index is called a "permuted index". Sometimes it is
    also called a "KWIC index". "KWIC" is an acronym for "Key
    Word In Context."
    
    Each recipe title is indexed under every major word in the
    title. For example, if the previous sentence were to be
    indexed, it would be indexed under "recipe", "title",
    "indexed", "major", and "word". There would be 5 separate
    index entries for that one sentence, each placed in proper
    alphabetical order according to the key word being indexed.
    
    Because titles can be very long but paper has only a
    certain width, the software that produces permuted indexes
    must make some decisions about how much of the title to
    show in each index entry. The Unix "ptx" program, which is
    the one that produces the recipe index, puts about a dozen
    words of the title in each index line. The word being
    indexed falls in the center.


* Some of the recipes call for ingredients that I have never heard of. For
  example, can you tell me what a "Graham Cracker" is? 

    There are certain ingredients that are considered to be staples
    in some countries but are utterly unavailable in others. For example,
    in Australia every cook has a substance called "copha", which is
    absolutely unavailable in North America and extremely rare in Europe.
    In England there is a substance called "golden syrup" which is
    very difficult to find in North America. The common American Graham
    cracker is quite unknown in other continents. Whenever there is
    a reasonable substitute that I know about, I will have edited the
    "Notes" section of the recipe to suggest substitute ingredients.
    But there are a few ingredients, notably copha, golden syrup, 
    and Graham crackers, for which I nave never been able to find a
    credible substitute.


* Why doesn't the cookbook have page numbers? This is a
  nuisance.

    The cookbook does not have page numbers because there
    are 5 new recipes issued each week, and the page numbers
    would change every week. Instead they are indexed by the
    keyword name of the recipe. We expect that you will keep
    your recipes in a notebook, filed alphabetically by keyword
    name. These names will not change from one week to the
    next, unlike page numbers.
    
    Another answer to this question, equally true, is that the
    cookbook does not have page numbers because the Unix
    manuals don't have page numbers, and the cookbook is
    printed using the Unix manual software. 

* I am new to the network. Is there an archive of back recipes? I would like
  to get a complete collection.

    There are two "official" sources of back issues, and probably many
    unofficial sources. All of the recipes ever posted are available
    via ARPAnet anonymous FTP from decwrl.dec.com, in directory "recipes".
    Consult your local ARPAnet expert for instructions on how to do this.

    There is also an "archive server" accessible by mail. This is a program
    that receives mail and processes commands in it, and mails you back
    the results. For example, if you send the server a message saying
    	"send recipe aardvark-stew"
    then it will mail you back a copy ofhe aardvark-stew recipe.
    Full instructions for using the archive server are in a companion
    posting to this message. If you can't find it, send the server a
    message containing the one word "help", and it will mail you back 
    the instructions by return mail. The server's address is
       mod-recipes-archive@decwrl.dec.com
    or {ucbvax,ihnp4,decvax,allegra,hplabs}!decwrl!mod-recipes-archive


* Why are the recipes encoded in some arcane text-formatting language like
  Troff.  Why don't you use TeX, or something more widely available?

    TeX can't format for the line printer, for one thing. TeX can only
    format in TeX fonts for TeX printers, and despite what you might
    think about its wide availability, there are a lot of people out there
    who print these recipes on dot-matrix printers and the like.

    USENET is primarily a Unix phenomenon, and most Unix sites have some
    form of troff or nroff. It is true that there are some sites on the
    network that are not UNIX sitres and do not have nroff, but often
    they don't have TeX either. The combination of posting troff versions
    of the recipes and posting cleartext versions seems to reach the widest
    possible audience.