[Groff] Macro packages (was: need advice on choosing a macro)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Wednesday, 29 January 2003 at  8:39:38 -0500, Jon Snader wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 11:19:35AM +0100, Jorgen Grahn wrote:
>> I'm sure others can elaborate, but the general advice you hear is to
>> avoid -ms for longer documents.
>
> I *certainly* disagree with that statement.  I used ms to write a
> book and Rich Stevens (e.g.) wrote all (7) of his (very large)
> books using it.  As I said in my last post in this thread, _Unix
> Text Processing_ is another example of a moderately large book
> (over 500 pages) written with ms.

No, UTP was written with its own macros.  They're related to ms, but
they're not the same thing, and they have significant extensions to
make them more usable.  They're part of the distribution.

I wrote "Porting UNIX Software" with O'Reilly's adaptation of the ms
macros.  They were quite adapted, in fact an extension of the macros
described in UTP, and they worked quite well.  When I started writing
"The Complete FreeBSD", I discovered that the stock ms macros didn't
really measure up.  I did some comparisons and ended up basing CFBSD
on the mm macros, a choice I haven't regretted often.

Greg
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