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

[T. Kurt Bond]

(Ted Harding) writes:
> The main macro packages for cocument formatting ared
> 'man', 'me', 'mm', 'ms'.
[...]
> "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 manual (not man pages!) for mm is titled "MM - Memorandum Macros".
(This is the June 1980 revision, by D. W. Smith, J. R. Mashey,
E. C. Pariser, and N. W. Smith, AT&T Bell Laboratories.  I got it from
an old VMS distribution of XROFF, a commercial distribution of troff.
Does anyone know if a newer version of this exists?  Was this part of
the Documenters Workbench?)

The manual says:

    The purpose of MM is provide a unified, consistent, and flexible
    tool for producing many common types of documents.  Although the
    UNIX time-sharing system provides other macro packages for various
    *specialized* formats, MM has become the standard, general-perpose
    macro package for most documents.

    MM can be used to produce:
    * Letters
    * Reports
    * Technical Memoranda
    * Released Papers
    * Manuals
    * Books

    The uses of MM range from single-page letters to documents of
    several hundred pages in length, such as user guides, design
    proposals, etc.

(I think the bit about MM being the standard macro package for most
documents has proved to be a little bit of wishful thinking.)

>From that it seems that it was intended to be a more complete package
to replace ms.
-- 
T. Kurt Bond, address@hidden