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

[Jon Snader]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 10:45:06AM +0200, Klaus Robert Suetterlin wrote:
>
> 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?
>

I use ms for everything--books, reports, memos, letters,
whatever.  If it's not an email, it gets written with groff/ms.
I have two macros .Xf and .Rf for cross references--these work
quite nicely for me.  You can contact me off line if you want
more info.

> 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.
>

With ms, at least, you're probably going to want to write some
customized macros.  This is really pretty easy (not nearly as
hard as looking at s.tmac might suggest).  To some extent, this
applies to the other packages as well.  If you're going to use
groff, you are going to have to do page layout by hand, and unless
you want your output to have a fixed predefined look (a la
LaTeX), you will want some customized macros.

A good introduction to all this is Mike Lesk's paper on ms
macros, and Brian Kernighan's Troff tutorial.  These are widely
available (see Rich Stevens' site, <http://www.kohala.com/start/>,
for example).  I haven't used any of the other packages (except
man) so I can't comment on their strengths and weaknesses except
to say that they have their adherents.

jcs