> From: "Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> ...
> > No rocket science (but maybe some patience) is required to write nroff.
> > Thanks to groff, typesetting nroff has become free.
>
> No rocket science, but perhaps archaeology.
> In the early 1980s, a unix box (68ks, vaxen, et.al.) came
> with a multi-volume manuals, including an nroff guide.
> In this millennium, not all distros have nroff guides.
As far as I can tell, all current UNIX (including Linux) distributions
include groff (or nroff/troff/pic/tbl/etc.) and both mdoc (or man)
and ms macros. UNIX (including Linux) distributions have thousands
of "man pages" written with the mdoc or man macros. For "nroff guides"
on your own systems, try `man -k roff` and `man -k mdoc`.
If you are a technical person and so a past, present, or potential
RFC author, you will have your own systems and chances better than
even that at least some of them will have `man` and `nroff`.
If you don't have such a system, then check the web for info.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=nroff+macros finds
23,900 pages.
> Who is still using this dino technology anyway?
Most RFC authors use that "dino technology," even if they don't
realize it. Read RFC 2223, including the first paragraph on page 5:
] Most of the RFCs are processed by the RFC Editor with the unix
] "nroff" program using a very simple set of the formatting commands
] (or "requests") from the "ms" macro package (see the Appendix). If a
] memo submitted to be an RFC has been prepared by the author using
] nroff, it is very helpful to let the RFC Editor know that when it is
] submitted.
Many and perhaps most technical people in the computer world outside
the Redmond and related corners use nroff at least to read system
documentation. If you don't and don't know anyone who does, then look
carefully at yourself. You might be a technical person in the Redmond
or similar corner of the world, but around here, chances are at least
even that if you don't have any current access to or use of nroff,
then you are not as involved with technical stuff as you might think.
That's not to say that you must like troff, but that computer technical
people have trouble escaping it, just as people in the mathematics
world have trouble escaping another "dino [markup] technology."
Are there ms2html or ms2xml equivalents to the many man2html scripts
and programs? When I asked that question of Google, I found only hints.
I did find some talk about XML to nroff converters.
Non-technical contributors to this thread might be interested to learn
that many HTML UNIX "man pages" mechanically generated from nroff sources,
often on the fly by cgi scripts.
Vernon Schryver [EMAIL PROTECTED]
