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

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> 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'm not really professionally involved in text formatting
(and journals want LaTeX source anyway), so I use groff
mainly for fun, e.g., to obtain nicely formatted paper
output of this and that odd document I find on the Web.

However, I did write my own groff macro package for typesetting
my thesis (I could have used LaTeX like everybody else, but as
I'm already fairly proficient with LaTeX I figured it would be
more challenging to use groff), which I also find very useful
for all sorts of other documents.  (Customizing ms, me, and mm
seemed to be more of an effort to me than writing new macros
from scratch.)  If anybody wants to have a quick look, I've
put a little demo file (which I use to test the macros with)
on the Web at
http://www.usm.uni-muenchen.de/people/hoffmann/roff/test.pdf.




OT: UTP (new) page 60: (assuming this list is the right
place to discuss errata)

"The single quotation marks are important because they keep
grep from interpreting the - as the beginning of an option."

-- that's baloney.  The quotes get eaten by the shell, and
grep still thinks there's an option it doesn't understand.
Better would be "grep -- -$".  (The error is in the original
book, but if the UTP transcription project is planning on
updating the book, it might be useful to correct the errors
as well.)