reid@decwrl.UUCP (10/02/86)
These are the most common questions about mod.recipes, and their answers. This message is going to become part of the automatic monthly postings beginning next month. * What macro package do these recipes use? What text formatter? I've tried troff -ms and troff -mm and other troff options and nothing works. The recipes use a combination of the "man" macro package and their own special macros. All of the troff macros and shell scripts that you need to print the recipes are distributerd as part of the "software package" in the automatic monthly (quarterly outside North America) posting. * I have the software all installed, but the index seems to be terribly broken. Everything else works fine; what is the matter with the index? The recipe titles are coming out in random order, with the words interchanged, and there are no page numbers. Help! The index is not broken; you just don't know how to read it. The recipe software uses the same kind of index that the Unix manuals use. In fact, the recipe index is generated using the same program that generates the index to the Unix manuals. This index is called a "permuted index". Sometimes it is also called a "KWIC index". "KWIC" is an acronym for "Key Word In Context." Each recipe title is indexed under every major word in the title. For example, if the previous sentence were to be indexed, it would be indexed under "recipe", "title", "indexed", "major", and "word". There would be 5 separate index entries for that one sentence, each placed in proper alphabetical order according to the key word being indexed. Because titles can be very long but paper has only a certain width, the software that produces permuted indexes must make some decisions about how much of the title to show in each index entry. The Unix "ptx" program, which is the one that produces the recipe index, puts about a dozen words of the title in each index line. The word being indexed falls in the center. * Why doesn't the cookbook have page numbers? This is a nuisance. The cookbook does not have page numbers because there are 5 new recipes issued each week, and the page numbers would change every week. Instead they are indexed by the keyword name of the recipe. We expect that you will keep your recipes in a notebook, filed alphabetically by keyword name. These names will not change from one week to the next, unlike page numbers. Another answer to this question, equally true, is that the cookbook does not have page numbers because the Unix manuals don't have page numbers, and the cookbook is printed using the Unix manual software. * I am new to the network. Is there an archive of back recipes? I would like to get a complete collection. The collection of back recipes is too big to send via computer mail (It fills about 1.3 megabytes per year; mod.recipes began on December 1, 1985). The full collection of back recipes is available on the ARPANET for anonymous ftp from host decwrl.dec.com as ~/recipes/*. There is not currently an archive server in the U.S. available for sites that do not have ARPAnet access. When I get the time I will install one, but it's trickier than you think because of flow-control problems.
reid@decwrl (Brian Reid) (10/28/86)
These are the most common questions about mod.recipes, and their answers. * What macro package do these recipes use? What text formatter? I've tried troff -ms and troff -mm and other troff options and nothing works. The recipes use a combination of the "man" macro package and their own special macros. All of the troff macros and shell scripts that you need to print the recipes are distributerd as part of the "software package" in the automatic monthly (quarterly outside North America) posting. * I have the software all installed, but the index seems to be terribly broken. Everything else works fine; what is the matter with the index? The recipe titles are coming out in random order, with the words interchanged, and there are no page numbers. Help! The index is not broken; you just don't know how to read it. The recipe software uses the same kind of index that the Unix manuals use. In fact, the recipe index is generated using the same program that generates the index to the Unix manuals. This index is called a "permuted index". Sometimes it is also called a "KWIC index". "KWIC" is an acronym for "Key Word In Context." Each recipe title is indexed under every major word in the title. For example, if the previous sentence were to be indexed, it would be indexed under "recipe", "title", "indexed", "major", and "word". There would be 5 separate index entries for that one sentence, each placed in proper alphabetical order according to the key word being indexed. Because titles can be very long but paper has only a certain width, the software that produces permuted indexes must make some decisions about how much of the title to show in each index entry. The Unix "ptx" program, which is the one that produces the recipe index, puts about a dozen words of the title in each index line. The word being indexed falls in the center. * Why doesn't the cookbook have page numbers? This is a nuisance. The cookbook does not have page numbers because there are 5 new recipes issued each week, and the page numbers would change every week. Instead they are indexed by the keyword name of the recipe. We expect that you will keep your recipes in a notebook, filed alphabetically by keyword name. These names will not change from one week to the next, unlike page numbers. Another answer to this question, equally true, is that the cookbook does not have page numbers because the Unix manuals don't have page numbers, and the cookbook is printed using the Unix manual software. * I am new to the network. Is there an archive of back recipes? I would like to get a complete collection. The collection of back recipes is too big to send via computer mail (It fills about 1.3 megabytes per year; mod.recipes began on December 1, 1985). The full collection of back recipes is available on the ARPANET for anonymous ftp from host decwrl.dec.com as ~/recipes/*. There is not currently an archive server in the U.S. available for sites that do not have ARPAnet access. When I get the time I will install one, but it's trickier than you think because of flow-control problems.
reid@decwrl (Brian Reid) (11/28/86)
These are the most common questions about mod.recipes, and their answers. * What macro package do these recipes use? What text formatter? I've tried troff -ms and troff -mm and other troff options and nothing works. The recipes use a combination of the "man" macro package and their own special macros. All of the troff macros and shell scripts that you need to print the recipes are distributerd as part of the "software package" in the automatic monthly (quarterly outside North America) posting. * I have the software all installed, but the index seems to be terribly broken. Everything else works fine; what is the matter with the index? The recipe titles are coming out in random order, with the words interchanged, and there are no page numbers. Help! The index is not broken; you just don't know how to read it. The recipe software uses the same kind of index that the Unix manuals use. In fact, the recipe index is generated using the same program that generates the index to the Unix manuals. This index is called a "permuted index". Sometimes it is also called a "KWIC index". "KWIC" is an acronym for "Key Word In Context." Each recipe title is indexed under every major word in the title. For example, if the previous sentence were to be indexed, it would be indexed under "recipe", "title", "indexed", "major", and "word". There would be 5 separate index entries for that one sentence, each placed in proper alphabetical order according to the key word being indexed. Because titles can be very long but paper has only a certain width, the software that produces permuted indexes must make some decisions about how much of the title to show in each index entry. The Unix "ptx" program, which is the one that produces the recipe index, puts about a dozen words of the title in each index line. The word being indexed falls in the center. * Why doesn't the cookbook have page numbers? This is a nuisance. The cookbook does not have page numbers because there are 5 new recipes issued each week, and the page numbers would change every week. Instead they are indexed by the keyword name of the recipe. We expect that you will keep your recipes in a notebook, filed alphabetically by keyword name. These names will not change from one week to the next, unlike page numbers. Another answer to this question, equally true, is that the cookbook does not have page numbers because the Unix manuals don't have page numbers, and the cookbook is printed using the Unix manual software. * I am new to the network. Is there an archive of back recipes? I would like to get a complete collection. The collection of back recipes is too big to send via computer mail (It fills about 1.3 megabytes per year; mod.recipes began on December 1, 1985). The full collection of back recipes is available on the ARPANET for anonymous ftp from host decwrl.dec.com as ~/recipes/*. There is not currently an archive server in the U.S. available for sites that do not have ARPAnet access. When I get the time I will install one, but it's trickier than you think because of flow-control problems. * Why are the recipes encoded in some arcane text-formatting language like Troff. Why don't you use TeX, or something more widely available? TeX can't format for the line printer, for one thing. TeX can only format in TeX fonts for TeX printers, and despite what you might think about its wide availability, there are a lot of people out there who print these recipes on dot-matrix printers and the like. USENET is primarily a Unix phenomenon, and most Unix sites have some form of troff or nroff. It is true that there are some sites on the network that are not UNIX sitres and do not have nroff, but often they don't have TeX either. The combination of posting troff versions of the recipes and posting cleartext versions seems to reach the widest possible audience. * Every month I see a message saying that the software has been posted, but it never reaches my site. What is the matter and what can you do about it? The monthly postings of software are posted with an "na" distribution. If you are in North America and do not receive them, it means that somewhere on your news feed path somebody is not passing the "na" distribution. The most common source of this problem is AT&T sites in New Jersey. There's usually not a lot you can do about this, except to try to find a news feed that doesn't depend on a poorly-managed machine.
recipes@decwrl.UUCP (01/28/87)
These are the most common questions about mod.recipes, and their answers. * What macro package do these recipes use? What text formatter? I've tried troff -ms and troff -mm and other troff options and nothing works. The recipes use a combination of the "man" macro package and their own special macros. All of the troff macros and shell scripts that you need to print the recipes are distributerd as part of the "software package" in the automatic quarterly posting; you can also retrieve the software from the archive system (see below). * I have the software all installed, but the index seems to be terribly broken. Everything else works fine; what is the matter with the index? The recipe titles are coming out in random order, with the words interchanged, and there are no page numbers. Help! The index is not broken; you just don't know how to read it. The recipe software uses the same kind of index that the Unix manuals use. In fact, the recipe index is generated using the same program that generates the index to the Unix manuals. This index is called a "permuted index". Sometimes it is also called a "KWIC index". "KWIC" is an acronym for "Key Word In Context." Each recipe title is indexed under every major word in the title. For example, if the previous sentence were to be indexed, it would be indexed under "recipe", "title", "indexed", "major", and "word". There would be 5 separate index entries for that one sentence, each placed in proper alphabetical order according to the key word being indexed. Because titles can be very long but paper has only a certain width, the software that produces permuted indexes must make some decisions about how much of the title to show in each index entry. The Unix "ptx" program, which is the one that produces the recipe index, puts about a dozen words of the title in each index line. The word being indexed falls in the center. * Why doesn't the cookbook have page numbers? This is a nuisance. The cookbook does not have page numbers because there are 5 new recipes issued each week, and the page numbers would change every week. Instead they are indexed by the keyword name of the recipe. We expect that you will keep your recipes in a notebook, filed alphabetically by keyword name. These names will not change from one week to the next, unlike page numbers. Another answer to this question, equally true, is that the cookbook does not have page numbers because the Unix manuals don't have page numbers, and the cookbook is printed using the Unix manual software. * I am new to the network. Is there an archive of back recipes? I would like to get a complete collection. There are two "official" sources of back issues, and probably many unofficial sources. All of the recipes ever posted are available via ARPAnet anonymous FTP from decwrl.dec.com, in directory "recipes". Consult your local ARPAnet expert for instructions on how to do this. There is also an "archive server" accessible by mail. This is a program that receives mail and processes commands in it, and mails you back the results. For example, if you send the server a message saying "send recipe aardvark-stew" then it will mail you back a copy ofhe aardvark-stew recipe. Full instructions for using the archive server are in a companion posting to this message. If you can't find it, send the server a message containing the one word "help", and it will mail you back the instructions by return mail. The server's address is mod-recipes-archive@decwrl.dec.com or {ucbvax,ihnp4,decvax,allegra,hplabs}!decwrl!mod-recipes-archive * Why are the recipes encoded in some arcane text-formatting language like Troff. Why don't you use TeX, or something more widely available? TeX can't format for the line printer, for one thing. TeX can only format in TeX fonts for TeX printers, and despite what you might think about its wide availability, there are a lot of people out there who print these recipes on dot-matrix printers and the like. USENET is primarily a Unix phenomenon, and most Unix sites have some form of troff or nroff. It is true that there are some sites on the network that are not UNIX sitres and do not have nroff, but often they don't have TeX either. The combination of posting troff versions of the recipes and posting cleartext versions seems to reach the widest possible audience. * Every month I see a message saying that the software has been posted, but it never reaches my site. What is the matter and what can you do about it? The monthly postings of software are posted with an "na" distribution. If you are in North America and do not receive them, it means that somewhere on your news feed path somebody is not passing the "na" distribution. The most common source of this problem is AT&T sites in New Jersey. There's usually not a lot you can do about this, except to try to find a news feed that doesn't depend on a poorly-managed machine.
recipes@decwrl.UUCP (02/28/87)
These are the most common questions about mod.recipes, and their answers. * What macro package do these recipes use? What text formatter? I've tried troff -ms and troff -mm and other troff options and nothing works. The recipes use a combination of the "man" macro package and their own special macros. All of the troff macros and shell scripts that you need to print the recipes are distributerd as part of the "software package" in the automatic quarterly posting; you can also retrieve the software from the archive system (see below). * I have the software all installed, but the index seems to be terribly broken. Everything else works fine; what is the matter with the index? The recipe titles are coming out in random order, with the words interchanged, and there are no page numbers. Help! The index is not broken; you just don't know how to read it. The recipe software uses the same kind of index that the Unix manuals use. In fact, the recipe index is generated using the same program that generates the index to the Unix manuals. This index is called a "permuted index". Sometimes it is also called a "KWIC index". "KWIC" is an acronym for "Key Word In Context." Each recipe title is indexed under every major word in the title. For example, if the previous sentence were to be indexed, it would be indexed under "recipe", "title", "indexed", "major", and "word". There would be 5 separate index entries for that one sentence, each placed in proper alphabetical order according to the key word being indexed. Because titles can be very long but paper has only a certain width, the software that produces permuted indexes must make some decisions about how much of the title to show in each index entry. The Unix "ptx" program, which is the one that produces the recipe index, puts about a dozen words of the title in each index line. The word being indexed falls in the center. * Some of the recipes call for ingredients that I have never heard of. For example, can you tell me what a "Graham Cracker" is? There are certain ingredients that are considered to be staples in some countries but are utterly unavailable in others. For example, in Australia every cook has a substance called "copha", which is absolutely unavailable in North America and extremely rare in Europe. In England there is a substance called "golden syrup" which is very difficult to find in North America. The common American Graham cracker is quite unknown in other continents. Whenever there is a reasonable substitute that I know about, I will have edited the "Notes" section of the recipe to suggest substitute ingredients. But there are a few ingredients, notably copha, golden syrup, and Graham crackers, for which I nave never been able to find a credible substitute. * Why doesn't the cookbook have page numbers? This is a nuisance. The cookbook does not have page numbers because there are 5 new recipes issued each week, and the page numbers would change every week. Instead they are indexed by the keyword name of the recipe. We expect that you will keep your recipes in a notebook, filed alphabetically by keyword name. These names will not change from one week to the next, unlike page numbers. Another answer to this question, equally true, is that the cookbook does not have page numbers because the Unix manuals don't have page numbers, and the cookbook is printed using the Unix manual software. * I am new to the network. Is there an archive of back recipes? I would like to get a complete collection. There are two "official" sources of back issues, and probably many unofficial sources. All of the recipes ever posted are available via ARPAnet anonymous FTP from decwrl.dec.com, in directory "recipes". Consult your local ARPAnet expert for instructions on how to do this. There is also an "archive server" accessible by mail. This is a program that receives mail and processes commands in it, and mails you back the results. For example, if you send the server a message saying "send recipe aardvark-stew" then it will mail you back a copy ofhe aardvark-stew recipe. Full instructions for using the archive server are in a companion posting to this message. If you can't find it, send the server a message containing the one word "help", and it will mail you back the instructions by return mail. The server's address is mod-recipes-archive@decwrl.dec.com or {ucbvax,ihnp4,decvax,allegra,hplabs}!decwrl!mod-recipes-archive * Why are the recipes encoded in some arcane text-formatting language like Troff. Why don't you use TeX, or something more widely available? TeX can't format for the line printer, for one thing. TeX can only format in TeX fonts for TeX printers, and despite what you might think about its wide availability, there are a lot of people out there who print these recipes on dot-matrix printers and the like. USENET is primarily a Unix phenomenon, and most Unix sites have some form of troff or nroff. It is true that there are some sites on the network that are not UNIX sitres and do not have nroff, but often they don't have TeX either. The combination of posting troff versions of the recipes and posting cleartext versions seems to reach the widest possible audience.
recipes@decwrl.UUCP (03/28/87)
These are the most common questions about mod.recipes, and their answers. * What macro package do these recipes use? What text formatter? I've tried troff -ms and troff -mm and other troff options and nothing works. The recipes use a combination of the "man" macro package and their own special macros. All of the troff macros and shell scripts that you need to print the recipes are distributerd as part of the "software package" in the automatic quarterly posting; you can also retrieve the software from the archive system (see below). * I have the software all installed, but the index seems to be terribly broken. Everything else works fine; what is the matter with the index? The recipe titles are coming out in random order, with the words interchanged, and there are no page numbers. Help! The index is not broken; you just don't know how to read it. The recipe software uses the same kind of index that the Unix manuals use. In fact, the recipe index is generated using the same program that generates the index to the Unix manuals. This index is called a "permuted index". Sometimes it is also called a "KWIC index". "KWIC" is an acronym for "Key Word In Context." Each recipe title is indexed under every major word in the title. For example, if the previous sentence were to be indexed, it would be indexed under "recipe", "title", "indexed", "major", and "word". There would be 5 separate index entries for that one sentence, each placed in proper alphabetical order according to the key word being indexed. Because titles can be very long but paper has only a certain width, the software that produces permuted indexes must make some decisions about how much of the title to show in each index entry. The Unix "ptx" program, which is the one that produces the recipe index, puts about a dozen words of the title in each index line. The word being indexed falls in the center. * Some of the recipes call for ingredients that I have never heard of. For example, can you tell me what a "Graham Cracker" is? There are certain ingredients that are considered to be staples in some countries but are utterly unavailable in others. For example, in Australia every cook has a substance called "copha", which is absolutely unavailable in North America and extremely rare in Europe. In England there is a substance called "golden syrup" which is very difficult to find in North America. The common American Graham cracker is quite unknown in other continents. Whenever there is a reasonable substitute that I know about, I will have edited the "Notes" section of the recipe to suggest substitute ingredients. But there are a few ingredients, notably copha, golden syrup, and Graham crackers, for which I nave never been able to find a credible substitute. * I live in Europe, and use metric measurements for my cooking. I am accustomed to measuring volumes in centiliters and deciliters, and weight in grams. I use teaspoons and tablespoons for small volumes. Why do you use milliliters for small volumes? It is a big nuisance to convert those milliliter quantities to grams in order to weigh them. Why not just use spoons? The problem is that there is no particular agreement on the size of teaspoons and tablespoons in different countries. In North America the sizes are fixed at 5ml for a teaspoon and 15ml for a tablespoon, but in other countries a teaspoon can vary from 3ml to 10ml and a tablespoon can vary from 10ml to 30ml. To use the milliliter measurements, you must first learn how many ml are in your spoons, and then translate from ml to your spoon volumes. The most common European measuring spoon sets are 1ml, 2.5ml, 5ml, 10ml, and 15ml, and the recipe quantities are adjusted for these sizes. If you live in a country (e.g. Holland) where a large spoon is 20ml, you should try to buy a French or German or Swiss set, or learn to live with the difference. * I submitted a recipe a couple of months ago, and I notice that you haven't published it yet, though you have published several newer recipes. What are you waiting for? I don't do first-in, first-out publication. I give high priority to recipes from most of Europe, medium priority to recipes from England and Australia, ordinary priority to recipes from North America, and low priority to recipes that have appeared recently elsewhere on the net. Sometimes I rearrange the sequence to cluster similar recipes together. Sometimes a particularly strange recipe will sit for weeks while I work up the gastronomic courage to test it. My goal is to achieve maximum diversity. If you send in another cheesecake or chili recipe, and you live in New Jersey, the recipe will sit in the queue for a long time. But if you live in Belgium or Italy or Norway or Iceland, or if you send in a well-written recipe for a complex and unusual pastry that your grandmother taught you to make, I wwill send it out almost instantly. * Do you really test all of these recipes? If so, you must have an iron stomach. No, I don't. Most of them are simple enough that I can just look them up in my library and find published recipes that are similar, and compare. Some I ask friends to try. Some I test myself. In general I only test the exotic, complicated, or unusual recipes. * Why doesn't the cookbook have page numbers? This is a nuisance. The cookbook does not have page numbers because there are 5 new recipes issued each week, and the page numbers would change every week. Instead they are indexed by the keyword name of the recipe. We expect that you will keep your recipes in a notebook, filed alphabetically by keyword name. These names will not change from one week to the next, unlike page numbers. Another answer to this question, equally true, is that the cookbook does not have page numbers because the Unix manuals don't have page numbers, and the cookbook is printed using the Unix manual software. * I am new to the network. Is there an archive of back recipes? I would like to get a complete collection. There are two "official" sources of back issues, and probably many unofficial sources. All of the recipes ever posted are available via ARPAnet anonymous FTP from decwrl.dec.com, in directory "recipes". Consult your local ARPAnet expert for instructions on how to do this. There is also an "archive server" accessible by mail. This is a program that receives mail and processes commands in it, and mails you back the results. For example, if you send the server a message saying "send recipe aardvark-stew" then it will mail you back a copy ofhe aardvark-stew recipe. Full instructions for using the archive server are in a companion posting to this message. If you can't find it, send the server a message containing the one word "help", and it will mail you back the instructions by return mail. The server's address is mod-recipes-archive@decwrl.dec.com or {ucbvax,ihnp4,decvax,allegra,hplabs}!decwrl!mod-recipes-archive * Why are the recipes encoded in some arcane text-formatting language like Troff. Why don't you use TeX, or something more widely available? TeX can't format for the line printer, for one thing. TeX can only format in TeX fonts for TeX printers, and despite what you might think about its wide availability, there are a lot of people out there who print these recipes on dot-matrix printers and the like. USENET is primarily a Unix phenomenon, and most Unix sites have some form of troff or nroff. It is true that there are some sites on the network that are not UNIX sitres and do not have nroff, but often they don't have TeX either. The combination of posting troff versions of the recipes and posting cleartext versions seems to reach the widest possible audience.