Re: [Groff] What is 'loom'?

[Jon Snader]

On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 07:49:21AM -0500, Larry Kollar wrote:
> 
> One or two of the Stevens books mentions using "Dave Hanson's loom
> program" to incorporate source code into the text of his book. A
> cursory Google search (plus another at a comp.sources archive) didn't
> turn up anything useful.
> 

I think you can find it on his Web page.  I don't have the URL, but
it's pretty easy to find with Google.

> I gather that it's main purpose is to prepare source code for
> inclusion in a troff document. From the sound of it, that could be
> useful for certain types of documentation.  So... is the source
> available anywhere? Is this something we should think about
> including with other preprocessors?
> 

It's actually pretty useful.  You can mark regions of code to include,
and you can also run the code through a filter before it gets sucked
into the troff source--that's useful for things like mapping \n -> \\n
and adjusting spacing.  I used it extensively in my book.

If you can get Hanson's approval, I think it would be a very useful
addition to the preprocessors.

Jon Snader