On May 27, 2025, at 6:55 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: The ones you want are the Stevens books. That guy made troff sing, he walked me through his process years (decades?) ago. He really knew troff and those books have held up to this day. No idea if the source is anywhere, but if it is, that should be archived because that is some great work. I have bwk's source to the awk book but am not sure if I can publish that. And I have to go turn a server where it lives. On Tue, May 27, 2025 at 06:16:48PM -0700, Adam Koszek wrote: -- --- Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

On May 28, 2025, at 6:52 PM, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com> wrote: [looping in groff list] Hi Larry and Adam, I too am a fan of W. Richard Stevens's work. I am disappointed that he passed long before I became involved in groff development and therefore had an excuse to frequently engage with him--I am certain I would have learned much about *roff and other things. At 2025-05-28T16:17:04-0700, Adam Koszek wrote: Alternatively or additionally, if someone has a thorough English- language description of those macros at the level of detail of a specification, then I can see them becoming part of the GNU roff distribution, either as a "contributed" component or as part of the "official" system, depending on who did the work and what copyright they were comfortable applying to it.[1] I emphasize that, for groff, "contrib" is not a wastebasket directory on a website; everything in the "contrib" directory of groff's Git repository gets built and shipped, and distributors generally provide the materials therein. Some of it gets automated testing and/or has seen recent bug fixes and development too, as with the groff version of the mm macros, and Peter Schaffter's popular (and sophisticated) "mom" package. Regards, Branden [1] groff's "LICENSES" file attempts to illuminate these matters.