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[Groff] What should me/mm/ms.. be for?


From: Ted Harding
Subject: [Groff] What should me/mm/ms.. be for?
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 09:46:15 -0000 (GMT)

Hi Folks,

I'd like to appeal to the extensive knowledge and
historical experience of readers for a possible
anzswer to a question which has intrigued me ever
since I have been using troff/groff.

The main macro packages for cocument formatting ared
'man', 'me', 'mm', 'ms'.

The question is: what are these respectively best
suited for? Or, maybe more precisely, what were they
originally intended to be best suited for?

I have always supposed that their names (which are
the originals from way back) are intended to suggest
their purpose, i.e. what type of document they were
designed for.

One is obvious: "troff -man" immediately evokes the
"man page" format, and of course it is absolutely
clear from the 'man' macros that this, and basically
only this, is its intended purpose.

Beyond that, it gets a bit vague as far as I can see.

"troff -ms" suggests "MS = manuscript", i.e. a general
purpose type of document, letter/report/book.

"troff -me" and "troff -mm" don't so obviously suggest
anything to me. I guess that "me" stands for "memorandum"
or similarly structured document. I don't really have
a clue what "mm" might stand for. The man-pages for these macros
(in any version of UNIX known to me) have never explained
this sort of thing. It would seem that the attitude of
the original creators was "the man pages will tell you
what can be done; take your pick according to what you
want to do".

The aspect that has bugged me is that these ("me", "mm", "ms")
have considerable overlap, but each also has features not in
the others (and, from experience, whichever one you use you
sooner or later reach a point where you wish you were using
another). So there is an element of constraint implied in
any particular choice of macros.

For instance, while "ms" (plus additional macros of my own)
is my general-purpose workhorse, often I would like to
have features of "me" to hand. (The obligatory page-break
in reverting from multi-column to single-column in "ms"
is a case in point).

Does anyone have comments on these questions?

With thanks,
Ted.

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Date: 28-Nov-01                                       Time: 09:46:15
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