[Groff] mom macroset 1.1.8 released

[Peter Schaffter]

Hi all.

A number of mom users have written me wondering whether mom supports
text colour directly, so I've (finally) added it.

The basic procedure is to define a new colour with .NEWCOLOR (whose
use is almost identical to .defcolor) or to "initialize" one of the
pre-defined colours from rgb.txt with .XCOLOR.  Both define a string
of <colorname> that can be called inline with \*[<colorname>] or with
a macro, .COLOR <colorname>.

The (very slight) advantage this has over groff's native way of
handling colour inline (\m[<colorname>]) is that it gives newcomers
to groff who use mom one less escape sequence to have to research
and memorize from the official groff documentation.  (BTW --has
anyone noticed how good groff's info docs are?  A huge improvement
over the situation a few years ago.)

More importantly, for users of mom's document processing macros, the
"control macros" that allow one to set the style of various document
elements (main heads, page headers/footers, quotes, page numbering,
etc) now have _COLOR variants (in addition to _FAMILY, _FONT, _SIZE
and so on), making it possible to, for example, have main heads
uniformly colourized red simply by invoking ".HEAD_COLOR red".

In addition to adding colour support, I also fixed a number of bugs
that had to do with page headers and footers, and the handling of
tabs when they're used during document processing.  (It appears
some users are subjecting mom to creative abuse I didn't foresee.)

Werner has applied the patches for mom v. 1.1.8 to the repository,
and a gzipped tarball of the whole mom package is available, as
usual, at

    http://www.ncf.ca/~df191/mom.html

Because Werner is hoping to release 1.19.1 soon, and it would be
nice if the version of mom included in that release were good and
stable, bug reports and suggestions for mom are especially welcome
at this time.

Cheers.

-- 
Peter Schaffter

Author of _The Schumann Proof_, appearing fall, 2004
(pub. RendezVous Press, Canada)