15 May
2018
15 May
'18
6:52 p.m.
Wouldn't the -man macros have predated -ms?
Indeed. My error.
The original -man package was quite weak. It got a major face
lift for v7 and once more at v9 or so. And further man-page
packages are still duking it out today. -ms has lots of rivals,
too, but its continued popularity attests to Mike Lesk's fine
sense of design.
Doug
15 May
15 May
7:40 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 8:52 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
You tell me, but I always understood/was lead to believe, they were
related i.e. -man and -ms took from each other. Don't Lesk have his hand
in both?
Wouldn't the -man macros have predated -ms?
Indeed. My error.
The original -man package was quite weak. It got a major face
lift for v7 and once more at v9 or so. And further man-page
packages are still duking it out today. -ms has lots of rivals,
too, but its continued popularity attests to Mike Lesk's fine
sense of design.
Amen...
It's always been the most straight forward of any I have known.
We added a few Macro's to it for some books, but pretty much used it as it
is for basic documents. Janet Egan, Steve Talbot and someone else who's
name I've forgotten, wrote a wonderful "Masscomp Style Guide" for all the
books - I still have my copy. Tim took it with him when he created
O'Reilly. All of the original 'NutShell' books and the set that got the
O'Reilly empire started (the X11 stuff) was all Masscomp superset of -ms.
Clem
ᐧ
8:23 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
We added a few Macro's to it for some books, but
pretty much used it as it
is for basic documents. Janet Egan, Steve Talbot and someone else who's
name I've forgotten, wrote a wonderful "Masscomp Style Guide" for all the
books - I still have my copy. Tim took it with him when he created
O'Reilly. All of the original 'NutShell' books and the set that got the
O'Reilly empire started (the X11 stuff) was all Masscomp superset of -ms.
They were still using this circa 1997; I did the update of sed&awk in
troff, but by then O'Reilly had switched to DocBook. They converted
the book to DocBook, but actually printed it by running it through
some hairy perl scripts that turned it *back* into troff -ms + their
additional macros!
It was a mess, but eventually the book got printed.
As an aside, they still use DocBook, but with a more rational printing
engine. Nevertheless, something simple like:
short Text text text text
Text text text text
long item here
Text text text text
Text text text text
which troff handled with ease takes a lot of tweaking and style sheets
and Heaven-knows-what-else to do in DocBook. Bleah.
Arnold
9:56 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
Hi,
Arnold wrote:
Clem wrote:
> wrote a wonderful "Masscomp Style Guide" for all the books - I still
> have my copy. Tim took it with him when he created O'Reilly.
Tim talks about Masscomp and the start of O'Reilly.
https://plus.google.com/+TimOReilly/posts/5cw5z69qZPg
DocBook. Bleah.
Eric S. Raymond has a long-term plan underway to get all man-page source
moved to DocBook or asciidoc using his doclifter program, and convincing
projects to make the switch. Unfortunately, some have. DocBook stinks
and it shows how long the project has been going that Eric chose it back
when it and XML were still shiny.
He argues that decent-quality output, e.g. PDF, isn't required any more.
(I like man pages I'm reading from top to bottom in higher resolution
than a TTY, e.g. perl(1) when you could learn it from its single page.)
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7998
--
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy
10:33 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 11:56 AM, Ralph Corderoy <ralph(a)inputplus.co.uk>
wrote:
Eric S. Raymond has a long-term plan underway to get all man-page source
moved to DocBook or asciidoc using his doclifter program, and convincing
projects to make the switch. Unfortunately, some have. DocBook stinks
and it shows how long the project has been going that Eric chose it back
when it and XML were still shiny.
xkcd on Standards <https://xkcd.com/927/> (And the Gnu guys have their doc
standard ...)
Things are more like the are today then they have ever been before."
Dwight David Eisenhower
ᐧ
ᐧ
10:53 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:33 AM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 11:56 AM, Ralph Corderoy <ralph(a)inputplus.co.uk>
wrote:
I recently committed a fix to FreeBSD that made booting a little less
verbose. Seems like on EC3 the scrolling is painfully slow. By removing the
one-line-per-core/thread (well, 5 lines) I was able to speed up boot times
40%. My comment was 'The more things change, the more it's 1985 again'
when
I was doing similar hacks to make programs run faster when run from the
Decwriter II in the lap connected at 300 baud...
Warner
Eric S. Raymond has a long-term plan underway to get all man-page source
moved to DocBook or asciidoc using his doclifter program, and convincing
projects to make the switch. Unfortunately, some have. DocBook stinks
and it shows how long the project has been going that Eric chose it back
when it and XML were still shiny.
xkcd on Standards <https://xkcd.com/927/> (And the Gnu guys have their
doc standard ...)
Things are more like the are today then they have ever been before."
Dwight David Eisenhower
ᐧ
ᐧ
10:55 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
Arnold wrote:
> DocBook. Bleah.
Ralph Corderoy <ralph(a)inputplus.co.uk> wrote:
Eric S. Raymond has a long-term plan underway to get
all man-page source
moved to DocBook or asciidoc using his doclifter program, and convincing
projects to make the switch. Unfortunately, some have. DocBook stinks
and it shows how long the project has been going that Eric chose it back
when it and XML were still shiny.
He argues that decent-quality output, e.g. PDF, isn't required any more.
He's wrong about that, and also that DocBook is wonderful. It's great
for machine processing (which is why O'Reilly likes it) but it's AWFUL
for the human author.
In fact, it's so bad that these days O'Reilly uses AsciiDoc with a
toolchain to convert to DocBook for printing.
Interesting reading (I skimmed it), but I will never switch any of
my man pages over to DocBook.
My two cents (as we wander even further afield),
Arnold
16 May
16 May
5:45 a.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
On Tue, 15 May 2018, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
Eric S. Raymond has a long-term plan underway to get
all man-page source
moved to DocBook or asciidoc using his doclifter program, and convincing
projects to make the switch. Unfortunately, some have. DocBook stinks
and it shows how long the project has been going that Eric chose it back
when it and XML were still shiny.
I like the manpage format! It tells me everything I need to know, in the
correct order, and it's in good old plain ASCII...
Unfortunately it seems that the youngsters of today (i.e. those with no
sense of Unix history whatsoever) have been suckled on this Whizzy-Wig
stuff.
-- Dave
5:48 a.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 09:45:08AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Tue, 15 May 2018, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
+1 - DocBook does nothing for me but it appears that I'm losing that argument.
The kids will get the mess they deserve I suppose.
Eric S. Raymond has a long-term plan underway to
get all man-page source
moved to DocBook or asciidoc using his doclifter program, and convincing
projects to make the switch. Unfortunately, some have. DocBook stinks
and it shows how long the project has been going that Eric chose it back
when it and XML were still shiny.
I like the manpage format! It tells me everything I need to know, in the
correct order, and it's in good old plain ASCII...
5:11 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
On Tue, 15 May 2018, Larry McVoy wrote:
Proof by example: "TERM= man man" i.e. turn off all possible highlighting
etc, and it's still readable (but you do get a warning about your terminal
not being fully functional or something - big deal). Try doing *that*
with your fancy doc system...
I've forgotten who designed the "man" format (JFO?) but it's great,
and they
deserved some sort of an award for it.
As for the kids of today, well, eventually they'll learn that their kids
in turn will get to choose their nursing home :-)
-- Dave, not quite old enough for a nursing home yet
I like the
manpage format! It tells me everything I need to know, in
the correct order, and it's in good old plain ASCII...
+1 - DocBook does nothing for me but it appears that I'm losing that
argument. The kids will get the mess they deserve I suppose.
15 May
15 May
8:18 p.m.
New subject: Who used *ROFF?
Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
OK, much thanks.
I like -ms, but if I was going to write a book with nested lists
and so on, I'd use -mm.
Arnold
Wouldn't
the -man macros have predated -ms?
Indeed. My error.
The original -man package was quite weak. It got a major face
lift for v7 and once more at v9 or so. And further man-page
packages are still duking it out today. -ms has lots of rivals,
too, but its continued popularity attests to Mike Lesk's fine
sense of design.
Doug
2412
days inactive
2413
days old
10 comments
7 participants
participants (7)
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arnold＠skeeve.com -
Clem Cole -
Dave Horsfall -
Doug McIlroy -
Larry McVoy -
Ralph Corderoy -
Warner Losh