UNIX Text Formatting Using the -ms Macros (1984) | Hacker News Reader

UNIX Text Formatting Using the -ms Macros (1984)

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55 pointstlcu17 comments

I just found a brand new PAGER for man: konqueror (man:/) https://imgur.com/a/F3o4VIu

Konqueror is a marvel. Too bad that KDE is now pushing that brain-damaged piece of code, Dolphin.

Dolphin is actually pretty much aligned with Konqueror.

Konqueror can open up anything using KDE's KParts. Applications and libraries provide different KParts and Konqueror is just a shell that can open them all.

Dolphin is Konqueror's KPart provider for file browsing.

So basically Konqueror's file browsing capability is provided by Dolphin.

I used troff to typeset a few papers, because it was relatively familiar from writing man pages and more light weight than LaTeX. And groff is installed on practically every Linux or BSD box.

But I switched to LaTeX because it it more mainstream for this kind of document production workflow, so for instance we have a LaTeX template for official-looking University letters, which would be hard to reproduce using troff. And I also switched from magicpoint http://member.wide.ad.jp/wg/mgp/ to Beamer https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer for presentation slides.

For man pages there is now the OpenBSD mandoc processor https://mandoc.bsd.lv/ which can turn semantic markup in -mdoc format in to fairly nice html and other formats. And though -mdoc is a bit weird it is easy to use, well documented, and powerful. It is so much nicer than the old -man macros!

Perl's POD ecosystem is worth looking at if you have similar needs today. Even if you don't use (or like) Perl.

It's very easy to use, and supports a lot of different output formats. So, one source doc can create troff man pages, html, markdown, PDF, etc.

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html

Can confirm. I wrote (for publication) about six novels using POD format plus some basic command line tools and a makefile, treating RTF as a final output format, back in the day.

(I was forced to adopt Microsoft Word for checking copy-edits only when my publishers insisted on moving to a Word/InDesign based workflow and ditching paper edits -- this was around 2008. Which in turn forced me to stop using vim as my main creative tool. If I had discretion to go back to chewing on text files today, I'd probably go with Markdown or a superset thereof.)

agree, though i've personally switched to python's sphinx - the input text is more readable and less 'markupy'

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/390724/how-to-create...

if you want to convert to pdf some of the steps involving postscript can be skipped using something like xelatex

although I believe groff itself has the ability to just straight generate pdf

sorry I forgot the purpose of the link was to provide nostalgia but here I go with all of the format and conversion paths... sorry :(

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/roff2html.1.html

There’s also the playfully named ‘an’ macro to format a man page:

nroff -man ls.1 | less

Ha ha. Some of my University submissions were generated directly from project code using troff -ms macros. Nostalgia.

Is there a PS or PDF version around somewhere? The HTML-output doesn't cover what is possible with the ms-macros.

the implication for me at least is a lot, and yeah a lot more has come to exist since so shrug still nothing like using a troff/nroff from 1984 I spose

heres a more recent groff implementation of it the macros: https://linux.die.net/man/7/groff_ms prob not what you're looking for, you prob want to get ahold of the orig nroff/troff files

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