
Mom macro set for groff - Tomte
http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/momdoc/toc.html
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Ianvdl
From [1]:

> "Who is mom meant for?

Mom (“my own macros”, “my other macros”, “maximum overdrive macros”...) is a
macro set for groff, designed to format documents in Portable Document Format
(.pdf) and PostScript (.ps). She’s aimed at three kinds of users:

Typesetters who suspect groff might be “the right tool for the job” but who
are frustrated, intimidated, or puzzled by groff’s terse, not-always-
typographically-intuitive primitives; Non-technical writers who need to format
their work easily, with a minimum of clutter; Newcomers to groff, typesetting,
or document processing who need a well-documented macro set to get them
started.

Mom is actually two macro packages in one: a very complete set of typesetting
macros, and an equally thorough set of document formatting macros. The
typesetting macros afford fine-grained control over all visible aspects of
page layout and design (margins, fonts, sizes, kerning, etc), while the
document formatting macros focus on the logical structure of a document
(titles, headings, paragraphs, lists, etc) and call on groff to render logical
structure into pleasing type. "

[1]:
[http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/momdoc/intro.html](http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/momdoc/intro.html)

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sevensor
A quick scan doesn't show any reference to (La)TeX, although Mom appears to
address similar needs. Such a notable absence feels deliberate -- I'd be
interested to know if there's an underlying philosophical difference, or an
article on "why you should let Mom typeset your next paper instead of using
LaTeX." (Would Mom be suitable for journal articles?)

~~~
avian
I have never seen an academic journal or conference that would accept
submission of manuscripts typeset in Groff. Even LaTeX seems ever more often
to be deprecated in favor of Word documents.

~~~
sevensor
I haven't seen it either, although if serious academic publishers are
switching to Word that's only going to hasten their slide into ruin. I've seen
conferences that don't ask for sources though, just PDFs. So there's no reason
in principle you couldn't use groff, except that nobody does it and there's no
template. I guess my question is what the experience of trying to write an
academic paper with Mom would be like, compared with LaTex.

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fegu
The mission statement doc for groff, in section typesetting backend, says it
needs support for modern font families, better unicode and a more modern
linebreak algorithm. These are serious drawbacks compared to modern latex. But
the pdf looks good and it does seem less complex to get into. Hmm, i guess
worth a closer look.

~~~
Tomte
Heirloom troff seems to support OpenType, Unicode and Knuth's algorithm.

I haven't found Windows binaries, yet, so I'll have to postpone playing with
it until I have got more free time.

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i_feel_great
Been using groff ms for years, switched to mom a couple of years ago. I highly
recommend it. I have switched almost completely from pdfLatex to groff mom.

Groff comes with (almost) every *nix, although some you may have to install
specifically (Ubuntu?), especially the mom macros although the groff_mom
manpage may suggest it is already there.

The only thing that I find a hassle is the setting up of font families. Mom
docs don't seem to say much on this.

Groff is much faster than Latex, and doesn't throw weird errors.

And thanks to Schaffter for this very useful macro. Schaffter used to have a
donation page somewhere, can't see it now.

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mablap
The only find for "Example" is
[http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/momdoc/intro.html#examples](http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/momdoc/intro.html#examples).

Did one of you use this to generate PDFs? If so, how does it look? I'd like to
see examples!

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kazinator
That's because you're searching just in the documentation. Try going up a few
levels in the website, like
[http://www.schaffter.ca/mom](http://www.schaffter.ca/mom) .

