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
