On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 8:52 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> Wouldn't the -man macros have predated -ms?

Indeed. My error.

You tell me, but I always understood/was lead to believe, they were related i.e. -man and -ms took from each other. Don't Lesk have his hand in both?

The original -man package was quite weak. It got a major face
lift for v7 and once more at v9 or so. And further man-page
packages are still duking it out today. -ms has lots of rivals,
too, but its continued popularity attests to Mike Lesk's fine
sense of design.

Amen...

It's always been the most straight forward of any I have known.

We added a few Macro's to it for some books, but pretty much used it as it is for basic documents. Janet Egan, Steve Talbot and someone else who's name I've forgotten, wrote a wonderful "Masscomp Style Guide" for all the books - I still have my copy. Tim took it with him when he created O'Reilly. All of the original 'NutShell' books and the set that got the O'Reilly empire started (the X11 stuff) was all Masscomp superset of -ms.

Clem