| Back to Table of Contents | Next: Definitions |
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:
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.
Mom’s typesetting macros control the basic parameters of type: margins, line lengths, type family, font, point size, linespacing, and so on. In addition, they allow you to move around on the page horizontally and vertically, and to set up tabs, indents, and columns. Finally, they let you adjust such typographic details as justification style, letter spacing, word spacing, hyphenation, and kerning.
The typesetting macros also provide the means to create horizontal and vertical rules, rectangles (boxes, frames), and ellipses (circles).
In terms of typographic control, the typesetting macros provide access to groff’s primitives in a way that’s consistent, sensible, and easy to use. With them, you can create individual pages designed from the ground up. Provided you have not signalled to mom that you want document processing (via the START macro; see below), every typesetting macro is a literal command that remains in effect until you modify it or turn it off. This means that if you want to create flyers, surveys, tabulated forms, curricula vitae and so on, you may do so in the good old-fashioned way: one step at a time with complete control over every element on the page.
Years of experience have convinced me that no program can ever replace the human eye and human input when it comes to high quality typesetting. Words and punctuation on the printed page are too variable, too fluid, to be rendered flawlessly by any algorithm, no matter how clever.
Mom, therefore, does not try to guess solutions for issues like hanging punctuation, or left-margin adjustments for troublesome letters like T, V and W. Rather, she provides tools that allow knowledgeable typesetters to handle these typographic challenges in ways that are easier and more intuitive than manipulating groff at the primitive level.
Mom’s document processing macros let you format documents without having to worry about the typographic details. In this respect, mom is similar to other groff macro packages, as well as to html and LaTeX. Where mom differs is in the degree of control you have over the look and placement of the various elements of a document. For example, if you’d like your headings underlined, or in caps, or centred rather than flush left, you can make the changes easily and have them apply to the whole document. Temporary and one-off changes are easy, too.
Mom has some features other macro sets don’t provide. For example, you can switch between draft-style and final-copy output. If you regularly make submissions to publishers and editors who insist on "typewritten, double-spaced," there’s a special macro— PRINTSTYLE TYPEWRITE— that changes typeset documents into ones that would make an old-school typing teacher proud. Footnotes, endnotes, tables of contents, multiple columns, nested lists, recto/verso printing and user designable headers and footers are also part of the fun.
Formatting documents should be easy, from soup to nuts. Writers need to focus on what they’re writing, not on how it looks. From the moment you fire up an editor to the moment you add "FINIS" to your opus, nothing should interfere with the flow of your words. The commands needed to format your work should be easy to remember, comprehensible, and stand out well from the text. There shouldn’t be too much clutter. Your documents should be as readable inside a text editor as they are on the printed page.
Unfortunately, in computerland, “easy,” “comprehensible,” and “readable” often mean “you’re stuck with what you get.” No document formatting system can give you exactly what you want all the time, every time. Documents always need to be tweaked, either to satisfy a typographic whim or to clarify some aspect of their content.
Groff has traditionally solved the problem of formatting vs. tweaking by requiring users of the common macro packages (mm, ms, me and their offspring) to resort to groff primitives and inline escapes for their special typesetting needs. Not to put too fine a point on it, groff primitives tend toward the abstruse, and most inline escapes are about as readable as an encrypted password. This does not make for happy-camper writers, who either find themselves stuck with a formatting style they don’t like, or are forced to learn groff from the ground up—a daunting task, to say the least.
Mom aims to make creating documents a simple matter, but with no corresponding loss of user control. The document processing macros provide an initial set of reasonable defaults, but anything that is not to your liking can be changed. In combination with the typesetting macros, you have all the tools you need to massage passages and tweak pages until they look utterly professional.
One rarely hears the term “user interface” in conjunction with document processing. Since formatting takes place inside a text editor, little thought is given to the look and feel of the formatting commands. Mom attempts to rectify this by providing users with a consistent, readable “coding” style. Most of the macros (especially in the document processing set) have humanly-readable names. Not only does this speed up learning the macros, it makes the sense of what’s going on in a document easier to decipher, typographically and structurally.
Mom does not try to be all things to all people. In contrast to the normal groff philosophy, she does not try to produce output that looks good no matter where it’s displayed. She’s designed for primarily for PDF or PostScript output, although with PRINTSTYLE TYPEWRITE she produces acceptable terminal copy. No attempt is made to be compatible with older versions of troff.
One special feature in mom’s design is the attention she pays to aligning the bottom margins of every page. Nothing screams shoddy in typeset documents louder than bottom margins that wander, or, in typesetter jargon, “hang.” There are, of course, situations where whitespace at the bottom of a page may be unavoidable (for example, you wouldn’t want a head to appear at the bottom of the page without some text underneath it), but in all cases where hanging bottom margins can be avoided, mom does avoid them, by clever adjustments to leading (“line spacing”) and the spacing between different elements on the page.
Writing documentation is tough, no doubt about it. One is never quite sure of the user’s level of expertise. Is s/he new to the application, new to its underlying protocols and programs, new to the operating system? At some point, one has to decide for whom the documentation is intended. Making the wrong choice can mean the difference between a program that gets used and a program that gets tossed.
Mom’s documentation assumes users know their way around their own operating system (basic file management, how to use the command line, how to use a text editor, etc). I run GNU/Linux, and while the documentation may exhibit a GNU/Linux bias, mom and groff can, in fact, be run on other platforms.
The documentation further assumes users at least know what groff is, even if they don’t know much about it. Lastly, it assumes that everyone—groff newbies and experts alike—learns faster from a few well-placed examples than from manpage-style reference docs. What mom’s documentation doesn’t assume is that you know everything—not about groff, not about typesetting, not about document processing. Even experts have odd lacunae in their knowledge base. Therefore, whenever I suspect that a term or procedure will cause head scratching, I offer an explanation. And when explanations aren’t enough, I offer examples.
The canonical reference materials for groff are cstr54 (a downloadable PostScript copy of which is available here) and the troff and groff_diff manpages. The most complete and up-to-date source of information is the groff info pages, available by typing info groff at the command line (assuming you have the TeXinfo standalone browser installed on your system, which is standard for most GNU/Linux distributions). And for inputting special characters, see man groff_char.
I’ve tried to avoid reiterating the information contained in these documents; however, in a few places, this has proved impossible. But be forewarned: I have no qualms about sidestepping excruciating completeness concerning groff usage; I’m more interested in getting mom users up and running. Mea culpa.
Groff has ancillary programmes (pre-processors) for generating
tables (tbl), diagrams (pic), and
equations (eqn), which may be used in conjuction
with mom. The manuals describing their usage are found at:
tbl http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/v7man/tbl/tbl.ps
pic http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/gpic.raymond.ps
eqn http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/v7man/eqn/eqn2e.ps
Note: Mom’s macro file (om.tmac) is heavily commented. Each macro is preceded by a description of its arguments, function and usage, which may give you information in addition to what’s contained in this documentation.
Addendum: The main macro file, om.tmac, is stripped of comments when groff is built from sources. om.tmac in the sources themselves still contains the comments, as do the tarballs posted on mom’s homepage.
The concise descriptions of macros in this documentation typically look like this:
arguments lists the macro’s arguments using conventions that should be familiar to anyone who has ever read a manpage. Briefly:
Some macros don’t require an argument. They simply start something. When you need to turn them off, the same macro with any argument will do the trick. That’s right: any argument (in caps, lowercase or a mixture thereof). This permits choosing whatever works for you: OFF, end, Quit, Q, X, and so on.
Since these macros toggle things on and off, the argument list simply reads toggle.
The required argument to TITLE is the title of your document.
Since it’s surrounded by double-quotes, you must include
them in the argument, like this:
.TITLE "My Pulitzer Novel"
The first required argument is a number that identifies the tab
(say, "3"). The second required argument is an indent from the
left margin (say, 6 picas). The third required argument is the
length of the tab (say, 3 picas). Therefore, at a minimum, when
using this macro, you would enter:
.TAB_SET 3 6P 3P
The remaining two arguments are optional. The first is a
single letter, either L, R, C or
J. The second, which is itself
optional after L, R, C or
J, is the word QUAD.
Therefore, depending on what additional information you wish to
pass to the macro, you could enter:
.TAB_SET 3 6P 3P L
or
.TAB_SET 3 6P 3P L QUAD
QUOTE begins a section of quoted text in a document and doesn’t require an argument. When the quote’s finished, you have to tell mom it’s done. .QUOTE So runs my dream, but what am I? An infant crying in the night An infant crying for the light And with no language but a cry. .QUOTE OFF
Alternatively, you could have turned the quote off with END, or X, or something else.
| Back to Table of Contents | Top | Next: Definitions |