Re: [Groff] poll: which macro packages are in common use / and why.

[joerg van den hoff]

Klaus Robert Suetterlin wrote:
> Hi,
>
> the short story is:  I want to poll who is using which macro
> package, why, and for what.  For example all You ms-hackers out
> there how do You do cross references?  Anyone doing articles or
> reports regularly -- which macro package?
>
> Regards, Robert S.
>
> long:
>
> I want to format report, article, book style material (for which I
> use TeX currently) with groff.  Don't talk me out of this, I really
> hate Tex, Latex and all the bloat around it.  I just cannot stand
> it any longer.
>
> To format letters (and letters only) I have been using the groff_mm
> (modified mmse for german localisation) macro package for the last
> two years.  I have not used any other macro package, but looked at
> ms and mom currently.
>
> I tried to identify the macro package that would fill my needs.
> These are mainly cross references, customisable headers and footers,
> bibliographic references (which can be done by use of external
> tools) and two column formatting.  Of mm, ms and mom, there seems to
> be only mm that has cross references.  ms seems to be quite far
> on the do it Yourself side of groff macros -- I'm not a typesetter
> or printer or macro-hacker and don't want to invent the wheel of
> page layout again, so I fear ms is not my way to go.
>
> Yesterday I started using mm for this, which is a bit hard because there
> seems to be no user guides publicly available... the UTP beeing the
> best I could get, but it does not contain the big picture of mm
> (unlike for example mom's documentation).
>
> Before I commit myself to really learning the mm way I wanted to
> poll who is using which macro package, why, and for what.
>
>
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well, I would still seriously consider ms for your purpose (for 
instance, documentation (even 'official' unix docu) is not so bad for 
basic functionality of ms).
headers are not that bad, too, but individualization apart from what is 
predefined is indeed not straightforward.

bibliographic references: 'refer' is sufficient for that, I think 
(again: indiviualisation of the output format can be a different story).

crossreferences: I usually get along by using the troff page number 
register with something like

text and even more text...
.ds A_REFERENCE \n%
...and still lots of more text in which a
refeference to page no. \*[A_REFERENCE] is included.


this of course introduces line breaks in the text section where you 
define the reference but it usually suffices (there is a small danger of 
a page break occuring just in front of the reference definition which 
would mess up the correct referencing...) but probably something smarter 
with inline escapes or a special macro is possible?

joerg