[TUHS] Who used *ROFF?

arnold at skeeve.com arnold at skeeve.com
Tue May 15 01:10:23 AEST 2018


Hi.

Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> From this distant point in time it seems that it all happened in a couple
> of weeks. Joe Ossanna did most of the teaching, and no doubt supplied
> samples to copy. As far as I know the only other instructional materials
> would have been man pages and the nroff manual (forbiddingly terse,
> though thorough). He may have made a patent-macro package, but I doubt
> it; I think honor for the first real macro package goes to Lesk's -ms.

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

Agreed, -man isn't for full-fledged "regular" documents and papers, but
in terms of removing the need for low-level *roff markup, it certainly
does the job.

(Of course, that may be what you meant by saying "the first *real* macro
package ...")

Thanks!

Arnold



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