
UNIX Text Formatting Using the -ms Macros (1984) - tlcu
https://www.hactrn.net/ietf/rfcgen/textms.html
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uranium235
I just found a brand new PAGER for man: konqueror (man:/)
[https://imgur.com/a/F3o4VIu](https://imgur.com/a/F3o4VIu)

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znpy
Konqueror is a marvel. Too bad that KDE is now pushing that brain-damaged
piece of code, Dolphin.

~~~
emilsedgh
Dolphin is actually pretty much aligned with Konqueror.

Konqueror can open up anything using KDE's KParts. Applications and libraries
provide different KParts and Konqueror is just a shell that can open them all.

Dolphin is Konqueror's KPart provider for file browsing.

So basically Konqueror's file browsing capability is provided by Dolphin.

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fanf2
I used troff to typeset a few papers, because it was relatively familiar from
writing man pages and more light weight than LaTeX. And groff is installed on
practically every Linux or BSD box.

But I switched to LaTeX because it it more mainstream for this kind of
document production workflow, so for instance we have a LaTeX template for
official-looking University letters, which would be hard to reproduce using
troff. And I also switched from magicpoint
[http://member.wide.ad.jp/wg/mgp/](http://member.wide.ad.jp/wg/mgp/) to Beamer
[https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer](https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer)
for presentation slides.

For man pages there is now the OpenBSD mandoc processor
[https://mandoc.bsd.lv/](https://mandoc.bsd.lv/) which can turn semantic
markup in -mdoc format in to fairly nice html and other formats. And though
-mdoc is a bit weird it is easy to use, well documented, and powerful. It is
so much nicer than the old -man macros!

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tyingq
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](https://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html)

~~~
cstross
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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uranium235
[https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/390724/how-to-
create...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/390724/how-to-create-pdf-
from-linux-man-pages-so-that-style-is-presereved)

~~~
uranium235
if you want to convert to pdf some of the steps involving postscript can be
skipped using something like xelatex

~~~
uranium235
sorry I forgot the purpose of the link was to provide nostalgia but here I go
with all of the format and conversion paths... sorry :(

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uranium235
[http://man7.org/linux/man-
pages/man1/roff2html.1.html](http://man7.org/linux/man-
pages/man1/roff2html.1.html)

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geertj
There’s also the playfully named ‘an’ macro to format a man page:

nroff -man ls.1 | less

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donaldihunter
Ha ha. Some of my University submissions were generated directly from project
code using troff -ms macros. Nostalgia.

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jhoechtl
Is there a PS or PDF version around somewhere? The HTML-output doesn't cover
what is possible with the ms-macros.

~~~
uranium235
heres a more recent groff implementation of it the macros:
[https://linux.die.net/man/7/groff_ms](https://linux.die.net/man/7/groff_ms)
prob not what you're looking for, you prob want to get ahold of the orig
nroff/troff files

