On Mon, 19 Jul 2021 18:41:16 -0500
Nate Bargmann <n...@n0nb.us> wrote:
> if I would get use out of
> either mm or ms for single page letters and some short documents
I think the answer to that question might be Yes.
I'm a tenderfoot among the troff graybeards here, having written my
first troff document in the 21st century. I use mdoc for man pages and
ms for everything else, plus the usual suspects: tbl, pic, eqn, and
grap. The target ouput is nearly always PDF, and seldom more than 10
pages. It's great for letters to your least favorite politician, and
recently I learned that with perhaps an afternoon's work it might be
good envelopes, too.
I suspect I chose to learn ms after reading Lesk's, "Typing Documents on
the UNIX System: Using the ?ms Macros with Troff and Nroff". The
me macros seemed more complicated, and there was no similar introduction
to mm. That void appears to be on the cusp of being filled.
I find very little need to use troff requests; most everything I need
is provided by ms. Exceptions are auto-incrementing registers for
numbered lists, and .fzoom to shrink monospace fonts. I do find the
quote macros in ms clunky:
\*Q\&Now is the time that tries men's souls\*U.
(I always insert the zero-space \& to pacifiy the spell-checker.) But
I don't use it much because most of the time the temptation to quote is
better served with italics.
A question came up on reddit that might act as a tie-breaker for
you. (!) It was: how to automatically increment a list with letters?
I don't use the style much, but if you want
1. foo
a) bar
b) baz
2. fubar
I don't know how that would be done.
--jkl
