How to choose a groff macro package

groff

I want to try a classic groff macro package for structured technical documents as a replacement for the arguably more complex LaTeX and DocBook.

I understand ms was the earliest macro package, and mm and me came later. How do I choose between ms, mm or me?

What problems were mm and me trying to solve over ms? How do I choose between mm or me should ms be too simple?

Best Answer

I applaud your use of old school text processing. But I'm a bit of a dinosaur.

groff has a command line flag "-m" so for the "ms" macros, you'd do this:

groff -m ms ....

That said, I don't recall a lot of functional difference between mm and me. I kept my resume in groff until very recently, and apparently, I found the "ms" macro package to be entirely sufficient. I did write a couple of macros I wrote in low-level direct groff commands to differentiate between major projects I worked on at a long-running corporate job.

Related Solutions

Groff Arithmetic – How to Perform Calculations

The current page number is \n% .

To interpolate the result of an arithmetic expression, I think you'll need to put it in a number register first.

Here's a macro (not exhaustively tested) that takes an expression as its argument, assigns the result to a (presumably unused) register named __, then interpolates the contents of the register.

Current page is \n%.
.br
.\" EI - eval and interpolate
.\" $1 is an expression to evaluate
.\" $2 (optional) is a string to append to the interpolated expression,
.\"    without any intervening whitespace
.de EI
.nr __ \\$1
\&\\n(__\\$2
..
.nr x 4
4 times 3 minus 5 is
'EI (\nx*3-5)
\&.
.br
Here there's no space before the period:
'EI (\nx*3-5) .
.br

After running through nroff:

Current page is 1.
4 times 3 minus 5 is 7 .
Here there's no space before the period: 7.

This seems like such a common thing to do that there may be a macro like it already in the standard macro packages, but I don't know.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Groff Arithmetic – How to Perform Calculations

Related Question