I hadn't expected Warren to forward my note directly to the list, so perhaps I'd better fill in some of the missing content. What I'm trying to do with the old manuals is a mix of different sorts of historic preservation: it's interesting to be able to produce something reasonably close to the original in appearance, including style differences, but I am also interested just in making the content accessible. That means being able to render the manual pages into troff -man on modern UNIX systems, or into nroff /man/man0/naa in the V5 root image, and roff and whatnot; but also into HTML because that's the right way to make text available on the web (Postscript is not text), and certainly into other forms I haven't thought of yet. To describe it all in utterly pragmatic terms, I want to be able to put all the old manuals up on the web somewhere in readable text form (not just page images or Postscript); and to produce manual data of authentic content and reasonably authentic style for use with the V5 binary distribution; and to be able to to print clear reference copies for myself, so I can pack my old photocopies away in a safe place; and to amuse myself by running style and diction on the different editions; and I want to be able to do that even if I don't have a copy of roff or the appropriate age-authentic macro package. So the idea is to mark up the text in a sufficiently high-level form that it can be rendered into any of the forms above (including the ones I haven't thought of) without undo work. I thought briefly about using the (V7-era) -man macros as the high-level language, and in fact much of the simple language I ended up inventing are obviously drawn from -man (e.g. there are constructs that are exactly .TH, .SH, and .SS spelled differently); but I wanted to avoid the temptation just to toss in more and more troff-specific syntax and semantics whenever some hard-to-represent construct popped up. (There are too many low-level constructs in the resulting language as it is.) I also thought about using some existing document metalanguage like XML or YODL, but those I looked at were far more ornate than seemed appropriate, and far too free-form; I don't mind carrying a few medium-sized awk programs around to render the text, but I object to having to port a language-processing subsystem larger than the V5 kernel just so I can render V5's manual pages. (Never mind how large awk and troff are these days.) There's a name I should also name here: my collaborator in California to whom the earlier message alludes is Jennine Townsend, who has photocopies of my photocopies from a sort of earlier collaboration. More on this in a few days; as I said to Warren, I hope to get a coherent sample of all this work up on the web shortly so people can see what I'm doing in more detail and comment, but I am in the midst of deciding whether to change jobs (it is a coincidence that the likely job change would put me nearer the OCR setup I've been using, but it is convenient), and in getting back into the swing of things at my present job after being out for two weeks to recover from having corrective maintenance on my sinuses, so it may not happen till the weekend. Norman Wilson Received: (from major@localhost) by minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au (8.8.8/8.8.8) id FAA25486 for pups-liszt; Tue, 14 Jul 1998 05:00:33 +1000 (EST)