G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Happy Halloween! > > Ready for something on the gory and disturbing side? I got six staples in my head, day before Halloween. They’re out now, but I had a live-action creepshow going for the day. Bring it. :D > I feel like I'm about 40% of my way through a huge update of Larry > Kollar's ms.ms document, as promised earlier this year. I've done most > of the work over the past 2-3 weekends; the promise of a release kicked > my rear into gear. I’ve looked it over. I’m not sure if the chatty parts are yours or mine at the moment. When I get a chance, I’ll run a diff and see which of us said what. Overall, let’s (both of us) focus on trimming anything that doesn’t help a reader get a -ms document together. > … I started discovering just how much is of our > s.tmac is undocumented, and how much confusion there has historically > been over what, _exactly_, constitutes the historical ms interface. I have mixed feelings about this. What’s the goal, here? Unless people are trying to resurrect older documents, they shouldn’t have to care about the “historical” interface — just use what’s there. But… There was once “the” *roff. Then it sunk, and Groff took its place. But thanks to Plan9, the “the” *roff resurfaced with a lot of nice updates, then got forked to Neatroff and Heirloom. Fortunately, the differences are small enough that one can write a -ms extension package for both, using “.ie g / .el” or “.if g / .if neat" in a few places. The whole point of ms.ms was *not* to get into internal details. It was mostly “here’s how you use Groff and -ms to put a document together, and here’s how you can control the formatting.” Yes, the end of the document does describe differences from the original -ms, and that’s probably helpful for the Plan9 derivatives. But unless you’ve unearthed a 35 year old document that assumes it’s using “the” *roff, and is doing all sorts of creepy things under the hood, it shouldn’t matter much. My college roommate sent me a book he wrote in -mm, back in the 80s, and I got Groff to format it by adding “\&” to the beginning (he had a custom cover). The same should apply to -ms documents. If we want to support data archaeologists, maybe we should write a separate document for them. :D — Larry
