On 22/1/25 02:31, Martin Lemaire wrote:
Born in a millennial GUI graphic design culture, I am slowly making my way 
towards textual practices allowing one to typeset text to be printed from 
frugal realms.

As a tool initially thought in order to normalize the writing of a thesis and 
the production of patents, can you think of any typeset productions made using 
(g)(t)r(un)off that step away from the default font and composition decisions ?

Furthermore, has there been communities of *roff users with an artistic or 
experimental perspective ?

Hi Martin,

I heartily endorse Peter Schaffter's mom macro package. The mom macro is the *only* package currently maintained; furthermore it has also been "modernized" by the use of more meaningful descriptions for its commands and requests. It is also extremely well documented.

If I may blow Peter's trumpet for him: if mom can't do it, it can't be done. Actually, I take that back: if mom can't do it, Peter will tell you the workaround (usually while waiting for him to include yet another feature into his next mom release).

FWIW, most people on this list are dinosaurs who predate the World Wide Web. We were brought up in an age of paper documentation and delivery by the Post Office (Postal Service). As such, most of us had, and still have, "business applications" which generated all our business documentation. In my case, all the documents for my photographic studio, including model releases, booking confirmations, invoices (with cute "PAID" stamp overlays), as well as standard business letters (on letterhead stationery) were all generated from scratch using groff and bash scripts.

In the early 2000s, as an exercise, I set out to produce the three children's books that are the categories of awards here in Australia for the annual Book Week prizes. I suspect that most countries in the western world have similar events. The most challenging by far was to produce my dummy entry into the "Very Young Child" category -- two signatures, 800 words, every leaf a different layout with at least one graphic, many full page bleeds over double pages (not only centrefolds), text along crazy paths, Title page, colophon, etc. It was all done with groff, no general macro package but lots of pure postscript, and glued together by bash. The only external applications were the graphics programs to produce the illustrations and a standard Linux imposition application. Unfortunately, when moving home a kind helper threw out both the floppy disks that contained the applications I had written and the paper copy of the outputs -- floppy disks, no one uses these anymore -- lorem ipsum, this is nonsense, you don't need this -- I didn't know what happened until after the garbage skip had been taken away.

As a final note, you can be counted as a dinosaur on this list if you look at the substantive contents of a normal business letter, "Re your 26th ultimo we wish to advise that the cheque in in the mail.", and then start kerning it.

Cheers,
Robert Thorsby
Don't only practice your Art, but force your way into its Secrets, for it and Knowledge can raise Men to the Divine.
  -- Ludwig van Beethoven


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