The Unix Programming Environment <https://www.amazon.com/Unix-Programming-Environment-Prentice-Hall-Software/dp/013937681X> has a nice chapter on the *roff family as well as other classic UNIX skills. In fact Rob continues to maintain a web page describing the book which is a classic: - Rob's UPE Page <http://books.cat-v.org/computer-science/unix-programming-environment/> Obviously you still buy a copy from amazon by following that URL or the like or you can just download and print it from: UPE Download from cs.uwec.edu <http://cs.uwec.edu/~buipj/teaching/cs.388.s14/static/pdf/upe.pdf> On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 6:06 PM, Grant Taylor &lt;gtaylor(a)tnetconsulting.net&gt; wrote:

Hi Grant, Somehow I missed your initial email, time to check my spam filters I guess. All this rambling below boils down to one thing: if you need help with roff, I'm your guy. Tell me what you want to do and I can probably come up with some example stuff that you can play with. I would suggest groff as a good start. James did a great job. There is the heirloom stuff, I've played with it, my take is that it is like Keith's nvi stuff, true to the origin but not useful because the world has moved on. Groff is my goto roff tool. Anyhoo, I *love* troff and the preprocessors, I can draw pictures in my head and then draw them in pic (I've done a lot of pic, got James to put an extension in gnu pic so that you could iterate through the N things you just drew, I can show you an exampe). I _think_ I have the sources to the troff docs, I feel like I did a project at one point to modernize how they looked. So you've gotten some good suggestions, I'm a fan of the original docs though. I still have the stack of docs that I bought at the UW Madison computing center - n/troff doc, pic, eqn, tbl. Then there were various others, like grap, chem, etc. I love all that stuff because it was designed at a time where you did your markup and you sent it to the lab where the printer was and you got it the next day or so. There were no bitmapped displays, all this stuff was done on 80x24 CRTs. So the markup language, the pic stuff, the eqn stuff, it all had to be something that you could see in your head and put down in text. That fits really well with how I think, I love the roff ecosystem to this day (and I've done conference proceedings in roff and in LaTex, I much prefer roff and the funny thing is when I show LaTex people roff they go, wow, simple). On Mon, Sep 04, 2017 at 03:18:35PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote: -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm