Comment by fusiongyro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fusiongyro | Hacker News Reader

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Feel like answering a couple more questions? :) The kinds of questions I have are not "good" questions for S.O. I'm tempted to try redoing a project of mine from ConTeXt in troff just to see what it's like. Do you recommend any particular macro package? Without any other input I'd probably try the -me macros, just because they've been compared to Pascal (versus the FORTRAN of -ms and the PL/1 of -mm).

Also, do you find yourself writing your own macros much? I haven't the faintest idea what that would require with troff, but I rely on this with TeX quite a bit, mostly to elevate stylistic markup into semantic markup. My impression is that if you want semantic macros you use a macro package, and even then you probably freely intersperse non-semantic macros.

This project I've been working on for a while, uses LuaTeX so that I can connect to a local database, perform some queries and typeset them and their output. I imagine this kind of thing would not be difficult to do directly with a custom pipeline step using troff. Have you done that kind of thing before? If so, how unpleasant was it?

Thanks for talking with me about this.

You'd do well to ask these on the https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff list for a wider set of opinions. It depends on the style and complexity of the document. -ms is simple enough that people like W. Richard Stevens would tweak it for their books. I understand the relative newcomer, -mom, is comprehensive, modern, and well supported by its author on the above list. I don't recognise the Pascal, etc., analogies. :-)

I do write my own macros. They can be just short-hands for a combination of others in the same way my ~/bin/l is exec ls -l "$@", or sometimes for a simple document I start with just troff and have some macros on top of that. Yes, any distinction over semantics is purely convention.

You may wish to read Kernighan's _Nroff/Troff User's Manual_, http://troff.org/54.pdf, otherwise known as CSTR #54. It's original troff, not groff, but as a succinct reference with elegant prose we often refer back to it. At the end is a tutorial introducing simple macros.

Integrating troff and friends in pipelines and scripts is easy. They take line-based text as input and produce it as output, only switching to binary for some output formats at the last hop. You can also run system(3) from within troff documents, e.g. to include the output of a command, but often that's not the easiest fit.

I recommend again the groff@gnu.org list; they're friendly, patient with newcomers, and interested in showing how they tackle the task at hand.

As it happens, the analogy is from the Unix Text Processing book, page 97: "Mark Horton writes us: I think of ms as the FORTRAN of nroff, mm as the PL/I, and me as the Pascal."

Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions! I will plough through some of this documentation and make my way over to the list.

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