
Scribe: A document specification language and its compiler (1980) [pdf] - todd8
http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/scan/CMU-CS-81-100.pdf
======
ScottBurson
The importance of Scribe was that it introduced _semantic markup_. Previously,
formatters -- at least, all those I ever used or heard of -- had only
_physical_ markup commands: change to this font, indent by this much, insert
this much vertical space, etc. Semantic markup, in contrast, specifies the
_intent_ rather than the details: emphasize this phrase, make a heading, make
a numbered or bulleted list, etc.

While Scribe itself was never used very widely -- it ran on PDP-10s, as I
recall, and was quite slow -- Reid's ideas influenced a number of other
designs, most notably those of HTML and LaTeX. (Less notably, but I can't
resist mentioning: there was a microcomputer re-implementation of much of
Scribe that I did some work on in 1980-1983, that was initially called
Scribble, then the FinalWord formatter, and eventually the Borland Sprint
formatter [0] [1].)

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(markup_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_\(markup_language\))

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_\(word_processor\))

~~~
lispm
The Symbolics Lisp Machine came with a Scribe implementation in Lisp.

Also the CMU CL documentation was written in Scribe, IIRC.

~~~
groovy2shoes
IIRC, the first edition of CLtL was written in Scribe as well, before being
re-rendered in LaTeX for the second edition.

------
wsh
Two interesting documents produced with Scribe were the 1985 editions of
Adobe’s red and blue books, the _PostScript Language Reference Manual_ and
_PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook_ , published by Addison-Wesley. The
colophon in the blue book explains the publishing workflow:

    
    
      Camera-ready copy for this book was created entirely with
      PostScript and printed on a Linotron 101 at Adobe Systems
      Incorporated. The book was created with the aid of the Scribe
      Document Production System (a product of Unilogic, Ltd.) as a
      Scribe document definition. The illustrations were PostScript
      program segments which Scribe integrated and placed on the
      pages along with the formatted text portions.
    
      Successive drafts of the book were processed with Scribe, each
      time generating a single PostScript print file. The book was
      proofed when needed by printing the file on an Apple
      LaserWriter PostScript printer. The final version was printed
      without modification on a Linotype Linotron 101 typesetter and
      delivered to Addison-Wesley. No manual paste-up of any kind
      was required.

------
todd8
Brian Reid won the Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper
Award for this in 1982.

------
dano
I used Scribe extensively under Tops-20 and printed the results on a Diablo
630. Here is an excerpt from the top of one of my theses just for reference.

@make(report)

@style(paperwidth 8.5 inches, paperlength 9.5 inches)

@style(leftmargin 1.0 inches, rightmargin 1.0 inches)

@style(topmargin 0.5 inches, bottommargin 1.0 inches)

@pageheading(right "@ref(page)")

@style(spread 1, indentation 5)

@style(spacing 2)

