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UNIX Text Formatting Using the -ms Macros (1984)

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Re: UNIX Text Formatting Using the -ms Macros (1984)

#13
post #11

I just found a brand new PAGER for man: konqueror (man:/) https://imgur.com/a/F3o4VIu

Konqueror is a marvel. Too bad that KDE is now pushing that brain-damaged piece of code, Dolphin.

Dolphin is actually pretty much aligned with Konqueror.

Konqueror can open up anything using KDE's KParts. Applications and libraries provide different KParts and Konqueror is just a shell that can open them all.

Dolphin is Konqueror's KPart provider for file browsing.

So basically Konqueror's file browsing capability is provided by Dolphin.

Re: UNIX Text Formatting Using the -ms Macros (1984)

#14
Perl's POD ecosystem is worth looking at if you have similar needs today. Even if you don't use (or like) Perl.

It's very easy to use, and supports a lot of different output formats. So, one source doc can create troff man pages, html, markdown, PDF, etc.

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html

Re: UNIX Text Formatting Using the -ms Macros (1984)

#15
post #14

Perl's POD ecosystem is worth looking at if you have similar needs today. Even if you don't use (or like) Perl. It's very easy to use, and supports a lot of different output formats. So, one source doc can create troff man pages, html, markdown, PDF, etc. https://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html

Can confirm. I wrote (for publication) about six novels using POD format plus some basic command line tools and a makefile, treating RTF as a final output format, back in the day.

(I was forced to adopt Microsoft Word for checking copy-edits only when my publishers insisted on moving to a Word/InDesign based workflow and ditching paper edits -- this was around 2008. Which in turn forced me to stop using vim as my main creative tool. If I had discretion to go back to chewing on text files today, I'd probably go with Markdown or a superset thereof.)

Re: UNIX Text Formatting Using the -ms Macros (1984)

#17
I used troff to typeset a few papers, because it was relatively familiar from writing man pages and more light weight than LaTeX. And groff is installed on practically every Linux or BSD box.

But I switched to LaTeX because it it more mainstream for this kind of document production workflow, so for instance we have a LaTeX template for official-looking University letters, which would be hard to reproduce using troff. And I also switched from magicpoint http://member.wide.ad.jp/wg/mgp/ to Beamer https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer for presentation slides.

For man pages there is now the OpenBSD mandoc processor https://mandoc.bsd.lv/ which can turn semantic markup in -mdoc format in to fairly nice html and other formats. And though -mdoc is a bit weird it is easy to use, well documented, and powerful. It is so much nicer than the old -man macros!

Re: UNIX Text Formatting Using the -ms Macros (1984)

#18
post #14

Perl's POD ecosystem is worth looking at if you have similar needs today. Even if you don't use (or like) Perl. It's very easy to use, and supports a lot of different output formats. So, one source doc can create troff man pages, html, markdown, PDF, etc. https://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html

agree, though i've personally switched to python's sphinx - the input text is more readable and less 'markupy'
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