[Groff] poll: which macro packages are in common use / and why.

[Klaus Robert Suetterlin]

Hi,

the short story is:  I want to poll who is using which macro
package, why, and for what.  For example all You ms-hackers out
there how do You do cross references?  Anyone doing articles or
reports regularly -- which macro package?

Regards, Robert S.

long:

I want to format report, article, book style material (for which I
use TeX currently) with groff.  Don't talk me out of this, I really
hate Tex, Latex and all the bloat around it.  I just cannot stand
it any longer.

To format letters (and letters only) I have been using the groff_mm
(modified mmse for german localisation) macro package for the last
two years.  I have not used any other macro package, but looked at
ms and mom currently.

I tried to identify the macro package that would fill my needs.
These are mainly cross references, customisable headers and footers,
bibliographic references (which can be done by use of external
tools) and two column formatting.  Of mm, ms and mom, there seems to
be only mm that has cross references.  ms seems to be quite far
on the do it Yourself side of groff macros -- I'm not a typesetter
or printer or macro-hacker and don't want to invent the wheel of
page layout again, so I fear ms is not my way to go.

Yesterday I started using mm for this, which is a bit hard because there
seems to be no user guides publicly available... the UTP beeing the
best I could get, but it does not contain the big picture of mm
(unlike for example mom's documentation).

Before I commit myself to really learning the mm way I wanted to
poll who is using which macro package, why, and for what.