Bill_von_Hagen@TRANSARC.COM (09/26/90)
To continue the thread about the availability of a good text on tbl,
I'd like to get some pointers to everyone's favorites texts on troff,
pic, and eqn. I'm obviously looking for copies, too, so if anyone has
texts on these subjects that they are no longer using, I'd be willing
to buy them. (They're for personal use, so condition - within reason
- isn't much of an issue.)
Thanks!
Bill (wvh@transarc.com)henry@hourglass.Eng.Sun.COM (Henry McGilton) (09/27/90)
In article <sb0_Tuf0BwwfEbzQ10@transarc.com>, Bill_von_Hagen@TRANSARC.COM writes: * To continue the thread about the availability of a good * text on tbl, I'd like to get some pointers to * everyone's favorites texts on troff, pic, and eqn. There are at least ten books on the market related to troff, pic, tbl, eqn, and Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all. I have read every one of these books, cover to cover, many, many times. Here are the two that I recommend. UNIX* Text Processing, by Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly. Published by Hayden Books. ISBN 0-672-46291-5. 666 pages. This book provides wide coverage of all aspects of using troff and the various troff preprocessors. troff typesetting for UNIX Systems, by Sandra Emerson and Karen Paulsell. Published by Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-13-930959-4. 360 pages. This book is more specific to troff, and has less coverage in using the preprocessors. Either or both of these books are good if you wish to get into writing your own macros or are trying to decipher existing macros. * UNIX is a footnote of AT&T Bell Laboratories. ........ Henry
lee@sq.sq.com (Liam R. E. Quin) (09/28/90)
>Bill_von_Hagen@TRANSARC.COM writes: > [...] I'd like to get some pointers to [...] texts on troff, pic, and eqn. henry@hourglass.Eng.Sun.COM (Henry McGilton) writes: >Here are the two that I recommend. I second Henry's suggestions, particularly for Dougherty & O'Reilly. You could also look at S.R. Bourne's book about Unix, which has a chapter on the -ms package... but which might give more ideas on mixing troff with other Unix utilities. There have been a number of papers from AT&T Bell Labs, including several on making indexes with troff, on using eqn, and a couple on pic. Some of these are included in Vol. 2a of the Unix Programmer's Manual, or are included as separate documentation in commercial Unix implementations. Henry McGilton and Mary McNabb have written a book on tbl which is very good (and is being discussed in other articles in this group...). If you're going to be designing macro packages, take a look at a book or two on typography. Ruari McLean's `The Thames and Hudson Manual of Typography' is a good and inexpensive start. (T&H, London, 1980). The big orange Chicago Manual of Style, and the little green Hart's Rules for Compositors at Oxford are useful, too. But I'm getting a bit far away from troff here... sorry. Lee -- Liam R. E. Quin, lee@sq.com, SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, +1 (416) 963-8337 "[...] you cannot sustain adult, probing, meaningful drama when the proceedings are interrupted every twelve minutes by a dozen dancing rabbits with toilet paper." [Melinda Snodgrass, quoted by Evelyn C. Leeper]