UNIX Text Formatting Using the -ms Macros (1984)

Re:UNIX Text Formatting Using the -ms Macros (1984) by tyingq on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @08:30AM (#23153197)

Perl's POD ecosystem is worth looking at if you have similar needs today. Even if you don't use (or like) Perl.

It's very easy to use, and supports a lot of different output formats. So, one source doc can create troff man pages, html, markdown, PDF, etc.

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html

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Re:UNIX Text Formatting Using the -ms Macros (1984) by cstross on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @09:27AM (#23153727)

Can confirm. I wrote (for publication) about six novels using POD format plus some basic command line tools and a makefile, treating RTF as a final output format, back in the day.

(I was forced to adopt Microsoft Word for checking copy-edits only when my publishers insisted on moving to a Word/InDesign based workflow and ditching paper edits -- this was around 2008. Which in turn forced me to stop using vim as my main creative tool. If I had discretion to go back to chewing on text files today, I'd probably go with Markdown or a superset thereof.)

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Re:UNIX Text Formatting Using the -ms Macros (1984) by cat199 on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @10:58AM (#23154693)

agree, though i've personally switched to python's sphinx - the input text is more readable and less 'markupy'

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