[COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix

[Clem Cole]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 10:08 AM John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Many of us who wrote articles for the Bell System Technical Journal would
> disagree. The BSTJ  publishers could transform something that made sense
> when viewed as troff output into unintelligible gibberish. You cannot split
> a UNIX command line into multiple lines just because it "looks better".
> Sometimes format really matters.
>
I think that is true for any scheme -- professionals and editors need to
work together.  That's what Jon was suggesting.  When they don't have
shared vocabulary/goals -  bad things can happen.   FWIW: I can not speak
for him directly as I never had this conversation with him (Win might
have), but from what I knew/know of Brian Ried I think he might agree with
what I'm suggesting.  IMO, *there will always be cases like the one that
you described*.  This is not particular to any document compiler system.
The question is how to bring the two sides together and who has the high
order bit?

My complaint with Word and the like, is that the 'control' is hidden.  It's
$%^& magic -- why is it indenting here?  Hey I did not tell it to make it
go italics ...

Like Jon and Larry, I'm a big roff fan and still use it.  But to give Brian
his due, his style sheets were in ASCII and what was happening on the page
was fairly easy to deduce.  That said, I never used Scribe for anything
large (like a book), which I can say I have done with troff.  In the late
1970s, I did use Scribe for some papers and found it quite easy to use.
Since that time, as a co-author I've also tried the same with LaTex and/or
Word and found both difficult.  When I have the lead and if I can, I'll use
troff -ms with a few extra Masscomp macros (that ORA used to pass on too --
the Steve Talbot extensions for lists in particular).

So from my professional experience, it has been mostly with troff, my use
of Scribe was short lived.

I'm pretty sure tht Keller tried to make creating books easier in
FrameMaker, as that was one of his target users.  But again I only played
with it, never really had to rely on it for anything.
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