Re: [Groff] ds in tmac

[Erich Hoffmann]

Hi. I tried to post this message to the group several times,
and I didn't succeed.

I give it one more try.

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: [Groff] ds in tmac
Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2003 19:52:46 +0200
From: Erich Hoffmann <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden

Hello all!


End of next week I'm going away for a month or so, but before I'd like
to let those who helped me know what I'm doing with groff by now.

BTW I'm wondering:  This was a high-volume list some years ago.  What
happened?

On Monday 08 September 2003 18:20, you wrote:
> On 08-Sep-03 Erich Hoffmann wrote:
> > On Friday 05 September 2003 21:56, you wrote:
>
> Good luck with all your explorations! I think people find that getting
> to know groff is an alternation between two activities: deciding to
> do something, and investigating how to do it. The more complex the
> things you decide to do, the more you will learn about groff.
>
> Best wishes,
> Ted.

I decided to start investigation.  Having got the impression that
plain groff is more a language than a typesetting program, I set out
to write a tmac file from scratch.  Took the m.tmac file as an example
and as literature I have the Troff User's Manual by JF. Ossanna and
BW. Kernighan; then N.Gehani & S.Lally: "Document Formatting and
Typeseting on the UNIX System II: grap, mv, ms & troff".  (And "Unix
in a Nutshell").

   As this is my first programming experience, I got lost in the file by
its sheer length.  First solution, split the tmac.file into chunks,
and before testing it catenate them into the unique use.tmac (as
I called it).  No good neither.  I needed chapters, sections and
subsections to find my way, but manually it is almost impossible to
keep he numbering up to date.

   When I remembered that groff is able to produce plain ascii output,
I got the idea to write a tool for my use.tmac, i.e. a tmac file that
is able to produce tmac files as output: "ac.tmac".  Besides being a
good practice because it adds an escape level to certain sequences,
is perhaps less crazy as it looks like at first sight.  With ac.tmac I
can have a tmac file with automatic numbered sections, multiple tables
of contents and cross references, so that navigation and orientation
will be much easier.  I'm planning to insert macros for a postscript
output of the comments.

   I didn't google whether such a tmac.tmac exists, for I wanted to
write it myself.  At the moment it is just able to format itself.
Now it needs excessive testing.  To be honest in the orthodox tmac
files like m or s there seems to be some black magic that I'm far from
understanding by now!  (Hope that I'm growing with the task.)  It's a
pity (well not a _great_ pity in fact) that I'm going on vacation
end of next week, so I'll be able to finish Ac only end of october.

It is really true: The more complex the task, the more learning comes
out of it.  I have the impression of not only learning groff, but to
get an approach to programming in general.  I'm shure that, even if
my project is pointless in the end, I won't regret a minute of it.


Bye!

erich

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