28 Nov
2018
28 Nov
'18
1:36 a.m.
At 2018-11-27T16:09:12-0800, Eric Allman wrote:
Speaking of troff, that was interesting documentation.
Ossanna's
documentation told you exactly what all of the commands did, but didn't
say why they did it. Many of the features seemed absolutely crazy at
first. I probably read that document 50 times when writing the -me
macros, every time having a light bulb go off in my head. I finally
concluded that _everything_ was needed to do something useful, and you
could do pretty much _anything_ with the available tools (including
things like page balancing). A master work of design, and blissfully
complete documentation (even if a bit obscure to the newbie).
Hi Eric,
I've been working on groff, and a while back, amid tidying up the
groff_me(7) man page, I added the following to the Notes section:
.
It is not known for certain what the \(lqe\(rq in \(lqme\(rq stands for,
but one can infer a derivation from the first initial of Eric P.\&
Allman (then of the University of California), who wrote the original
technical papers documenting the package.
.
I've done some digging but could not locate an authoritative statement.
Would you like to make one?
This list has been helpful in clearing up some other historical
inaccuracies in the groff man pages, though surely some remain.
Regards,
Branden