Re: Writing techical paper in mm

[Bento Borges Schirmer]

Branden,

Em qua., 15 de mai. de 2024 às 18:03, G. Branden Robinson
<g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> escreveu:
> One of our subscribers, T. Kurt Bond, maintains what I consider to be
> the go-to version of the DWB mm documentation; it's what I use when
> staring at groff's implementation and trying to make decision about
> features and bugs.
>
> https://tkurtbond.github.io/troff/mm-all.pdf

yes, I found it online at some point! interesting material.

> > its last chapter mentions some tools like spell, style and diction, I
> > guess they come from this package?
>
> As far as I know, _those_ DWB programs did not become freely licensed as
> DWB troff did, but I haven't seriously researched the issue.

oh okay!

> > Unless I find them, I'll have to find deroff or unroff to check my
> > grammar using some other tool!
>
> deroff and unroff have a hard job to do, and I literally _never_ hear
> testimonials from people employing them.  The difficulty arises from the
> nature of the *roff language, which is Turing complete.  To know what
> letters are going to appear on the page, you have to interpret
> *roff--nearly the whole language.  The more of it you interpret
> correctly, the more reliable your results will be.
>
> I suggest using "groff -a".  This "approximate output mode" works as
> well or better than any deroff or unroff I've seen.  The caveat is that
> special characters show up in a special notation.  The most notorious
> example is probably the hyphen.

good! I'll try groff -a, and keep in mind hyphens!

> The groff_mm man page in groff 1.23.0 is much improved over earlier
> versions, and even more so in groff Git.  (This is my opinion as the
> person who's started maintaining it.)  Also many bugs have been fixed.
>
> https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=groff&func=browse&set=custom&msort=0&bug_id[]=&submitted_by[]=0&category_id[]=121&severity[]=0&bug_group_id[]=0&resolution_id[]=0&assigned_to[]=0&status_id[]=0&plan_release_id[]=0&summary[]=&advsrch=0&msort=0&chunksz=50&spamscore=5&report_id=225&sumORdet=&morder=bug_id%3C&offset=0#results
>
> (Savannah bug tracker URLs are obnoxious--sorry.)
>
> I would be keenly interested to hear of any bugs in GNU mm,
> particularly any seemingly unintentional incompatibilities with DWB mm.

I'm just starting hehe! and yes, I'm always looking up groff_mm
several times, it's been of great help!

> Please continue to use this mailing list as a resource for questions,
> problems, or clever mm hacks you have.

haha sure :)

Best regards,
Bento