13 Feb
2025
13 Feb
'25
2:53 p.m.
On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 8:05 AM Norman Wilson <norman(a)oclsc.org> wrote:
[snip]
-mpm (mpm(6) in 10/e vol 1) was a largely ms-compatible
package with special expertise in page layout.
[snip]
I think the odds are fairly good (but not 100%) that
groff would do a reasonable job of rendering the papers;
as I said, the hard part is the macro packages. I'm
not sure -mpm ever made it out of Research.
If it's the one I'm thinking about, then it did make it out in drips
and drabs on Plan 9; it was in the 1st and 2nd Edition distributions.
However, to be used to its full effect, -mpm also required a
postprocessor, called `pm`, which was written in C++ and built with
cfront. Probably for that reason, it was not distributed with Plan 9
3rd edition or later (the later versions of Plan 9, available under an
Open Source license, did not include cfront).
All of the historical Plan 9 editions are now available under the MIT
license and available for download from the Plan 9 Foundation. I just
checked and it appears that mpm is in the tar archive for the 2nd
edition; one can download that here: https://p9f.org/dl/index.html
(It's probably in the tarball for the 1st edition too, but I didn't
look.)
Note that the source files for sys/src/cmd/pm are all named
"whatever.c", but are C++ code in disguise. At one point I took a
swing at trying to rewrite it in C, because the idea seemed cool, but
other things took precedence and I never got back to it. I haven't
tried to build it with a modern C++ compiler, but it probably wouldn't
be _that_ much work for someone motivated to do so.
- Dan C.