On Mon, 29 Jun 2020 14:36:31 -0400, > G. Branden Robinson wrote on Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 03:08:04AM +1000: > > [1] The only painful part of this is losing Larry Kollar's ms node, > > which is the _only_ macro package that has ever documented well in > > Texinfo as far as I can tell. I think it would be pretty elegant to > > port this material to an ms document, ship it with the groff > > distribution, and point people to it. Alternatively, the chapter could > > be reframed as an example of how to document a macro package, discarding > > its current pretentions to comprehensiveness.
Ingo Schwarze <schwa...@usta.de> wrote: > I don't feel strongly about this either way. I mean, -ms it not > exactly the most relevant macro package in 2020, or is it? I think -ms is still relevant. It is (I think) the only package other than -mom that was adapted to work with pdfmark, as documented in "Portable Document Format Publishing with GNU Troff". (I've often wished someone had adapted -mm.) And along with -man, -ms is supported as an output format for the popular pandoc document converter, useful for both people who want to convert from 30+ formats including org-mode, markdown, ReStructuredText, MS Word docx and OpenOffice/LibreOffice ODT, into more palatable troff -ms, or those who just want to convert those formats into PDF via pdfroff with -ms because groff is available by default or easily on most operating systems and a groff installation is 2 orders of magnitude smaller that a TeX install and is usually much faster processing documents producing PDF. As for the ms info node, I agree it would be good to integrate the information from that into the groff_ms(7) man page. (I don't see something like the info section "General structure of an `ms' document" in groff_ms(7), for instance; this was in "Using groff with the -ms Macro Package" by Larry Kollar, but that document may have been superseded; I can only find a PDF version of it on the net at https://www.mail-archive.com/ion-general@lists.berlios.de/msg01838/ms.pdf ). If that happens and the ms info node is removed, it should be at least replaced with a pointer to the man pages like most of the macro packages mentioned. -- T. Kurt Bond, tkurtb...@gmail.com -- T. Kurt Bond, tkurtb...@gmail.com
