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16 <h1 align="center"><u>WHAT IS MOM?</u></h1>
19 <a href="#INTRO_INTRO">Who is mom meant for?</a>
21 <a href="#INTRO_TYPESETTING">Typesetting with mom</a>
23 <a href="#INTRO_DOCPROCESSING">Document processing with mom</a>
25 <a href="#INTRO_PHILOSOPHY">Mom's philosophy</a>
27 <a href="#INTRO_DOCUMENTATION">A note on mom's documentation</a>
29 <a href="#CANONICAL">Canonical reference materials</a>
31 <a href="#MACRO_ARGS">How to read macro arguments</a>
33 <h2><a name="INTRO_INTRO"><u>Who is mom meant for?</u></a></h2>
35 <strong>Mom</strong> ("my own macros", "my other
36 macros", "maximum overdrive macros"...) is a macro set for
37 groff, designed to format documents for PostScript output.
38 She's aimed at three kinds of users:
41 <li>typesetters who suspect groff might be "the right
42 tool for the job" but who are
43 frustrated/intimidated by groff's terse, geeky,
44 not-always-typographically-intuitive
45 <a href="definitions.html#TERMS_PRIMITIVES">primitives</a>;
47 <li>non-scientific writers (novelists, short story writers,
48 journalists, students) who just want their work to
51 <li>newbies to computer typesetting, document processing, or
52 groff who need a well-documented macro set to help them get
56 As might be inferred from the above, <strong>mom</strong> is two macro
57 packages in one: a set of typesetting macros, and a set of document
58 processing macros. The typesetting macros govern the physical
59 aspects of page layout and provide sane, comprehensible control over
60 typographic refinements. The document processing macros let you focus
61 on a document's content and logical structure without worrying about
62 typesetting or page layout at all.
64 Because <strong>mom</strong> provides both typesetting and document
65 processing macros, it's safe to say she blurs the distinction between
66 document processing and document design. While her basic document style
67 comes with pretty spiffy defaults (okay--change "spiffy"
68 to "typographically professional"), you can easily control
69 how all the various document elements look: titles, page headers and
70 footers, page numbering, heads, subheads, footnotes and so on can be
71 made to come out exactly the way you want. And should you need precise
72 typographic control over elements in a document that fall outside the
73 range of <strong>mom</strong>'s document element tags, you don't have to
75 <a href="definitions.html#TERMS_PRIMITIVES">primitives</a>
76 in order to accomplish what you want; the typesetting macros take
80 <a name="INTRO_TYPESETTING">
81 <h2><u>Typesetting with mom</u></h2>
84 <strong>Mom</strong>'s typesetting macros control the basic parameters
85 of type: margins, line length, type family, font, point size,
86 linespacing, and so on. In addition, they allow you to move around
87 on the page horizontally and vertically, and to set up tabs, indents,
88 and columns. Finally, they let you adjust such typographic details as
89 justification style, letter spacing, word spacing, hyphenation, and
93 In terms of typographic control, these macros resemble the
94 commands used on dedicated typesetting computers like Compugraphics and
95 Linotronics. Most of them simply give access to groff's typesetting
96 primitives in a way that's consistent and easy to use. A few of
97 them (tabs and indents, for example) handle fundamental typesetting
98 requirements in ways radically different from groff primitives.
101 With <strong>mom</strong>'s typesetting macros, you can, if you wish,
102 create individual output pages that you design from the ground up.
103 Provided you have not signalled to <strong>mom</strong> that you
104 want document processing (via the
105 <a href="docprocessing.html#START">START</a>
106 macro; see below), every macro is a literal command that remains in
107 effect until you modify it or turn it off. This means that if you
108 want to create flyers, surveys, tabulated forms, curricula vitae and
109 so on, you may do so in the good old-fashioned way: one step at a
110 time with complete control over every element on the page.
112 Years of reading various mailing lists dealing with computer
113 typesetting (groff, TeX, and friends) have convinced me that no program
114 can ever replace the human eye and human input when it comes to high
115 quality typesetting. As of this writing, a thread on the subject of
116 "micro typography" in groff has been going on for nearly a
117 month. The reason for the lengthy thread is obvious; words and
118 punctuation on the printed page are too variable, too fluid, to be
119 rendered flawlessly by any algorithm, no matter how clever. (For
120 whatever it's worth, a similar problem exists with engraving musical
123 <strong>Mom</strong> does not try to solve the problems posed
124 by things like hanging punctuation, left-margin adjustments for
125 upper case letters like T and W, and so on. She merely tries to
126 provide tools that allow knowledgeable typesetters to come up with
127 solutions to these problems in ways that are easier and more
128 intuitive than manipulating groff at the
129 <a href="definitions.html#TERMS_PRIMITIVES">primitive</a>
130 level. As a professional typesetter of more than two decades, and a
131 writer, I have encountered few situations that cannot be handled by
132 <strong>mom</strong>'s typesetting macros.
134 <strong>Author's note:</strong> One area where groff itself needs
135 serious rethinking is in the matter of an algorithm that takes into
136 account both word and letter spacing when
137 <a href="definitions.html#TERMS_JUST">justifying</a>
138 lines. At present, only word spacing is adjusted, requiring what I
139 consider an unnecessary amount of user intervention whenever
140 letter spacing is required.
142 <a name="INTRO_DOCPROCESSING">
143 <h2><u>Document processing with mom</u></h2>
146 <strong>Mom</strong>'s document processing macros let you format
147 documents without having to worry about the typographic details.
148 In this respect, <strong>mom</strong> is similar to other groff macro
149 packages, as well as to html and LaTeX. Where <strong>mom</strong>
150 differs is in the degree of control you have over the look and
151 placement of the various elements of a document. For example, if you
152 don't want your heads underlined, or you want them bigger/smaller,
153 or you'd prefer them to be in a different font, or you'd rather they
154 were flush left instead of centred, you can make the changes easily
155 and have them apply to the whole document. Temporary and one-off
156 changes are easy, too.
158 <strong>Mom</strong> has some nifty features other macro sets
159 don't provide. For example, you can switch between draft-style and
160 final-copy output. If you regularly make submissions to publishers
161 and editors who insist on "typewritten, double-spaced," there's a
163 <a href="docprocessing.html#PRINTSTYLE">PRINTSTYLE TYPEWRITE</a>
164 --that changes typeset documents into ones that would make your
165 high-school typing teacher proud. Footnotes, endnotes, tables of
166 contents, multiple columns, nested lists, recto/verso printing and
167 user designable headers and footers are also part of the fun.
169 <a name="INTRO_PHILOSOPHY">
170 <h2><u>Mom's philosophy</u></h2>
173 Formatting documents should be easy, from soup to nuts. Writers need
174 to focus on what they're writing, not on how it looks. From the
175 moment you fire up an editor to the moment you add "FINIS"
176 to your opus, nothing should interfere with the flow of your words.
177 The commands needed to format your work should be easy to remember,
178 comprehensible, and stand out well from the text. There shouldn't
179 be too much clutter. Your documents should be as readable inside a
180 text editor as they are on the printed page.
182 Unfortunately, in computerland, "easy,"
183 "comprehensible," and "readable" often mean
184 "you're stuck with what you get." No document formatting
185 system can give you exactly what you want all the time, every time.
186 Documents, it seems, always need to be tweaked, either to satisfy a
187 typographic whim or to clarify some aspect of their content.
189 Groff has traditionally solved the problem of formatting vs. tweaking
190 by requiring users of the common macro packages (mm, ms, me and their
191 offspring) to resort to groff
192 <a href="definitions.html#TERMS_PRIMITIVES">primitives</a>
194 <a href="definitions.html#TERMS_INLINES">inline escapes</a>
195 for their special typesetting needs. Not to put too fine a point on
196 it, groff primitives tend toward the abstruse, and most inline escapes
197 are about as readable in-line as an encrypted password. This does
198 not make for happy-camper writers, who either find themselves stuck
199 with a document formatting style they don't really like, or are
200 forced to learn groff from the ground up--a daunting task, to say
203 <strong>Mom</strong> aims to make creating documents a simple matter,
204 but with no corresponding loss of user control. The document
205 processing macros provide an excellent set of defaults, but if
206 something is not to your liking, you can change it. And in combination
207 with the typesetting macros, you have all the tools you need to
208 massage passages and tweak pages until they look utterly professional.
210 One rarely hears the word "user interface" in conjunction
211 with document processing. Since the user formatting takes place
212 inside a text editor, little thought is given to the look and feel
213 of the formatting commands. <strong>Mom</strong> attempts to rectify
214 this by providing users with a consistent, readable "coding"
215 style. Most of the macros (especially in the document processing set)
216 have humanly-readable names. Not only does this speed up learning
217 the macros, it makes the sense of what's going on in a document,
218 typographically and structurally, easier to decipher.
220 <strong>Mom</strong> does not try to be all things to all people.
221 In contrast to the normal groff philosophy, she does not try to
222 produce output that looks good no matter where it's displayed.
223 She's designed for printed output, although with
224 <a href="#PRINTSTYLE">PRINTSTYLE TYPEWRITE</a>
225 she produces acceptable terminal copy. She makes no attempt to be
226 compatible with older versions of troff.
228 One special feature in <strong>mom</strong>'s design is the attention
229 she pays to aligning the bottom margins of every page. Nothing screams
230 "shoddy" in typeset documents louder than bottom margins
231 that wander, or, in typesetter jargon, "hang." There are,
232 of course, situations where whitespace at the bottom of a page may
233 be desirable (for example, you wouldn't want a head to appear at the
234 bottom of the page without some text underneath it), but in all cases
235 where hanging bottom margins can be avoided, <strong>mom</strong> does
236 avoid them, by clever adjustments to leading ("line spacing")
237 and the spacing between different elements on the page.
239 <a name="INTRO_DOCUMENTATION">
240 <h2><u>A note on mom's documentation</u></h2>
243 Writing documentation is tough, no doubt about it. One is never
244 quite sure of the user's level of expertise. Is s/he new to the
245 application, new to its underlying protocols and programs, new to
246 the operating system, new to computers? At some point, one has to
247 decide who the documentation is for. Making the wrong decision can
248 mean the difference between a program that gets used and a program
251 <strong>Mom</strong>'s documentation assumes users know their way
252 around GNU/Linux. It further assumes they at least know what groff
253 is, even if they don't know much about it. Lastly, it assumes that
254 everyone--groff newbies and experts alike--learns faster from
255 a few well-placed examples than from manpage-style reference docs.
256 What <strong>mom</strong>'s documentation doesn't assume is that
257 you know everything--not about groff, not about typesetting,
258 not about document processing. Even experts have odd lacunae in
259 their knowledge base. Therefore, whenever I suspect that a term
260 or procedure will cause head scratching, I offer an explanation.
261 And when explanations aren't enough, I offer examples.
264 <a name="CANONICAL"><h3><u>Canonical reference materials</u></h3></a>
266 The canonical reference materials for groff are
267 <strong>cstr54</strong> (a downloadable PostScript copy of which is
269 <a href="http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/">here</a>)
270 and the <strong>troff</strong> and <strong>groff_diff</strong>
271 manpages. Another excellent source of information (maybe the best)
272 is the groff <strong>info</strong> pages, available by typing
278 at the command line (assuming you have <strong>info</strong>
279 installed on your system). And for inputting special characters,
280 see <strong>man groff_char.</strong>
282 I've tried to avoid reiterating the information contained in these
283 documents; however, in a few places, this has proved impossible.
284 But be forewarned: I have no qualms about sidestepping excruciating
285 completeness concerning groff usage; I'm more interested in getting
286 <strong>mom</strong> users up and running. <em>Mea culpa.</em>
288 <strong>Note:</strong> <strong>Mom</strong>'s macro file
289 (om.tmac) is heavily commented. Each macro is preceded by a
290 description of its arguments, function and usage, which may
291 give you information in addition to what's contained in this
294 <a name="MACRO_ARGS">
295 <h3><u>How to read macro arguments</u></h3>
298 The concise descriptions of macros in this documentation typically
301 Macro: <strong>NAME</strong> <nobr>arguments</nobr>
303 <var>arguments</var> lists the macro's arguments using conventions that
304 should be familiar to anyone who has ever read a manpage. Briefly:
307 <li>Macro arguments are separated from each other by spaces.
308 <li>If an argument is surrounded by chevrons
309 ( < > ), it's a description of the argument,
310 not the argument itself.
311 <li>If an argument begins with or is surrounded by double-quotes, the
312 double quotes MUST be included in the argument.
313 <li>If the user has a choice between several arguments, each of the
314 choices is separated by the pipe character ( | ),
315 which means "or."
316 <li>Arguments that are optional are surrounded by square brackets.
317 <li><off> in an argument list means that any argument
318 other than those in the argument list turns the macro off.
321 <a name="TOGGLE_MACRO"><h3><u>Toggle macros</u></h3></a>
323 Some macros don't require an argument. They simply start something.
324 When you need to turn them off, the same macro with <em>any</em>
325 argument will do the trick. That's right: ANY argument. This permits
326 choosing whatever works for you: OFF, END, QUIT, DONE, Q, X... Hell,
327 it could even be I_LOVE_MOM.
329 Since these macros toggle things on and off, the argument list
337 <h3>Example 1: an argument requiring double-quotes</h3>
339 Macro: <strong>TITLE</strong> <nobr>"<title of document>"</nobr>
342 The required argument to <strong>TITLE</strong> is the title of your
343 document. Since it's surrounded by double-quotes, you must
344 include them in the argument, like this:
347 .TITLE "My Pulitzer Novel"
350 <h3>Example 2: a macro with required and optional arguments</h3>
352 Macro: <strong>TAB_SET</strong> <nobr><tab #> <indent> <length> [ L | R | C | J [ QUAD ] ]</nobr>
355 The first required argument is a number that identifies the tab (say,
356 "3"). The second required argument is an indent from the left margin
357 (say, 6 picas). The third required argument is the length of the tab
358 (say, 3 picas). Therefore, at a minimum, when using this macro,
365 The remaining two arguments are optional. The first is a single
366 letter, either L, R, C or J. The second, which is itself optional
367 after L, R, C or J, is the word QUAD. Therefore, depending on
368 what additional information you wish to pass to the macro,
374 .TAB_SET 3 6P 3P L QUAD
377 <a name="TOGGLE_EXAMPLE"></a>
378 <h3>Example 3: a sample toggle macro:</h3>
380 Macro: <strong>QUOTE</strong> <nobr>toggle</nobr>
383 <strong>QUOTE</strong> begins a section of quoted text in a document
384 and doesn't require an argument. When the quote's finished,
385 you have to tell <strong>mom</strong> it's done.
389 So runs my dream, but what am I?
390 An infant crying in the night
391 An infant crying for the light
392 And with no language but a cry.
396 Alternatively, you could have turned the quote off with END, or
397 X, or something else.
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