[TUHS] man-page style

[arnold at skeeve.com]

Eric Allman <tuhs at eric.allman.name> wrote:

> [I sent this almost a week ago, but it never showed up, probably because
> Speaking of troff, that was interesting documentation.  Ossanna's
> documentation told you exactly what all of the commands did, but didn't
> say why they did it.  Many of the features seemed absolutely crazy at
> first.  I probably read that document 50 times when writing the -me
> macros, every time having a light bulb go off in my head.  I finally
> concluded that _everything_ was needed to do something useful, and you
> could do pretty much _anything_ with the available tools (including
> things like page balancing).  A master work of design, and blissfully
> complete documentation (even if a bit obscure to the newbie).

Any chance you, or someone else, could write that missing manual that
explains the "why" of the various troff features?

I've been through CSTR 54 a few times too, although I haven't tried
to write a macro package from scratch, and I have to admit that there
are things that mystify me.

Thanks!

Arnold