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

[Robert Goulding]

On Sep 23, 2004, at 3:45 AM, Klaus Robert Suetterlin wrote:

> 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?
I use mainly -ms, though I have a great deal of fondness for -me.  -ms 
is perhaps the simplest to use, but has some limitations in 
functionality.  It does have good refer support, though, which can be 
customized if you're willing to dive into the code (I'm thinking of 
putting together a HOWTO on this, summarizing what I found by trial, 
error and banging my head against the wall).  Cross-references are also 
available, because you can snip out the cross-ref module from -mm and 
use it with a few minor modifications; I posted such a module here a 
while ago: http://www.ffii.org/archive/mails/groff/2002/Oct/0022.html.  
If you want just about any clever effects with headers/footers etc., 
the kind of thing you might want to do in a real book, you're going to 
have to do quite a bit of hacking.

-mm has many more hooks for customization, and you *can* find out 
anything you need from the man page -- but you're right, a user manual 
would be useful (though note that there is a chapter on -mm in Unix 
Text Processing).  -mm does not have refer support, but I posted some 
time back a module ripped out of s.tmac which does the job: 
http://www.ffii.org/archive/mails/groff/2002/Nov/0183.html.  -mm 
contains just about everything you would want to put together a real 
book, but I personally find the interface to these features to be a bit 
cumbersome.

I think that -me is a very well thought-out macro set: I like the 
syntax, similar to LaTeX environments, and it has built-in the concept 
of document structure via the .++ request.  There is a clever mechanism 
for getting chapter/section titles into headers/footers, which can 
change depending on what 'part' of the book you're in (preface, body, 
appendix etc.)  I've found that it has the best support built-in for 
such tricks as full-page floats in 2-column text.  This macro set is 
certainly powerful enough to use for a book, but there a couple of 
drawbacks: you will have to hack your own cross-reference macros (or 
adapt the ones from -mm -- should be easy); there are a couple of bugs 
that I haven't been able to figure out (about displays that break over 
pages); and if you do find yourself needing to make any changes, you 
will have to deal with -me's code, which is old-style, cryptic 
2-character requests.  It's not *so* difficult to figure this out (and 
the version of -me in the tarball has some comments, which are stripped 
out when the macros are installed on your computer) but will give you a 
headache at first.

Also note, if this is important to you, that only -ms documents can be 
converted to HTML.  Often this is the deciding factor for me: I write 
the article, submit the pdf to a journal, and then they want the text 
in Word format; until someone writes grortf, it's easiest to get HTML 
output, open it in Word, and save it as a doc.

I can't say anything about -mom, because I've never used it.

Robert.

--
Robert Goulding
Program in History and Philosophy of Science
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame IN 46556