Re: A weird problem with mm title page macros

[Oliver Corff]

Hi Branden,

I get *your* point, but I was lured to believe that I could write my own
Memorandum Type by copying an existing one in the ../tmac/mm/ directory
and assigning an appropriate number. I thought "types 0 to 5 are
supported" can be interpreted as "a file for these types is provided",
which in reality is not true because only types 0, 4 and 5 are in that
directory. Hence I thought it safe to create a type 3 (or 6 since this
was nowhere to be seen).

Best regards,

Oliver.

PS: I find it facinating to see how much our interpretations of the same
text fragments occasionally differ from each other, based on our totally
different backgrounds. You as the total insider, me, by all fair
standards, as one who is not a newcomer any more, but also not really
mature with the matter yet is accustomed to very textual (in the sense
of textualism) interpretations of text.


On 21/11/2023 22:50, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Hi Oliver,
>
> At 2023-11-21T19:49:09+0100, Oliver Corff wrote:
> > I tried to play with 4.MT by copying and renaming it as 6.MT and
> > calling .MT 6, but then the result is as if I had no .MT call at all.
> > Strange.
> As weird as it seems, that's documented.
>
>       MT [type [addressee]]
>               Select memorandum type.  These correspond to formats used
>               by AT&T Bell Laboratories, where the mm package was
>               initially developed, affecting the document layout.  Some
>               of these included a cover page with a caption categorizing
>               the document.  groff mm uses type to construct the file
>               name /home/branden/groff-HEAD/share/groff/1.23.0/tmac/mm/
>               type.MT and load it with the mso request.  Memorandum types
>               0 to 5 are supported; any other value of type is mapped to
>               type 6.  If type is omitted, 0 is implied.  addressee sets
>               a string analogous to one used by AT&T cover sheet macros
>               that are not implemented in groff mm.
>
>               type   Description
>               0      normal memorandum; no caption
>               1      captioned “MEMORANDUM FOR FILE”
>               2      captioned “PROGRAMMER’S NOTES”
>               3      captioned “ENGINEER’S NOTES”
>               4      released paper
>               5      external letter
>
>               See COVER for a more flexible cover sheet mechanism.
>
> (Read something appropriate for your system where that filespec
> appears.)
>
> Jörgen Hägg seemed pretty intent on steering people to the `COVER`
> macro.  I think he intended groff mm's implementations of `LT` and `MT`
> only for reproduction of historical AT&T documents (or those that made
> no demands that DWB mm couldn't satisfy).
>
> Regards,
> Branden
--

Dr. Oliver Corff
Wittelsbacherstr. 5A
10707 Berlin
G E R M A N Y
Tel.: +49-30-85727260
Mail:oliver.corff@email.de