Lovely Paperwork with Groff (Half I)
Stephen Ramsay
I haven’t intentionally used a phrase processor because the late
eighties.
In fact, I’ve used Phrase right here and there after I didn’t have a selection,
however not since MultiMate—and earlier than
that, WordStar—have
I deliberately sat down with full possession of my colleges and opened
up a phrase processor with a view to write one thing I care about.
Okay, not fairly. I went off to school in 1988 with a typewriter that
form of had a display screen and form of behaved like a phrase
processor. I suppose at this time it could be thought to be a “distraction free”
writing gadget alongside the strains of the very
chic and absurdly expensive stuff made by FreeWrite, although because it
exceeded the clamor of an precise typewriter, it tended to distract
(i.e., get up) everybody within the dorm. And I suppose there was a quick
interval firstly of grad college after I was utilizing some type of
phrase processor on a really outdated—and I believe, second hand—pre-OS-X Mac
laptop computer, although I can’t recall what that program might need been.
However the reality is that the minute I heard about Linux, I instantly
needed to modify to that. I had been utilizing industrial Unixes—AIX,
Solaris—on the varied part-time (and later, full-time) jobs I had in
grad college and simply liked it. On the time, nonetheless, Linux didn’t appear
to have a phrase processor (I’m positive it really did). What did folks use
to jot down paperwork? After I requested somebody on the native Linux Customers’ Group
about this, they advised me about LaTeX. And that started a really lengthy love
affair with typesetting normally and TeX particularly. I’ve used
some variation of TeX/LaTeX to jot down just about each paper, each
article, each discuss, each letter, each slide, and each lecture I’ve
written for the final twenty-five years.
One of many nice unwanted effects of that is that I can nonetheless learn all
the stuff I’ve written because the mid-nineties. Actually, I can often
nonetheless compile it into one thing that may be displayed or printed (DVI,
Postscript, or PDF). And actually, after a long time of utilizing it, the “code”
not often will get in the way in which. I’m so used to writing this fashion that I typically
begin writing LaTeX when the format I’m imagined to be utilizing is HTML or
Markdown. Actually, I discover it actually arduous to work in a daily phrase
processor, not due to any precise aversion, however just because I’m
continually hitting the important thing sequences for Vim with a view to enter the styling
instructions for LaTeX. And that’s one other factor I’ve been doing without end:
writing all the things in Vim.
However the true purpose I caught with it had extra to do with a bizarre quirk
I’ve as a author (that I suppose began after I was
launched to TeX). In an effort to assess whether or not the factor I’m writing is
good or not, it’s necessary for me to see what it could seem like as a
actual e-book (or letter, or article, or no matter). It’s true that I really like
typography, web page design, and all associated issues, however I believe it’s
additionally a form of psychological trick I’m taking part in on myself. If it
seems to be actual, that makes it extra seemingly that it’ll sooner or later
be actual. As in, completed. As in,
revealed.
So the primary paragraph or so of the e-book I simply wrote appeared like
this after I was composing it:
chapter{Textual Behavior in the Human Male}label{textual behavior}
textsc{My title,} of course, refers to the infamous Kinsey Report:
emph{Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,} first published in 1948.
The Kinsey report is, like emph{Harry Potter,} emph{The Omnivore's
Dilemma,} and The Book of Job, one of those books you feel you've read
even if you haven't actually read it. Its general outlines and
conclusions, and the national sense of scandal that ensued, are well
known even after sixty years. When you do sit down to read it, though,
the most shocking thing isn't its prurience or its candor, but its easy,
approachable tone. It sounds like this:That’s what it looks like in Vim (more or less). But when I “compile”
the document, it looks like this:
Now that’s starting to look like a book!
Yes. Fussing with typography is an excellent way to
procrastinate, but then again, I have published a fair amount of stuff,
and … well, this is my “process,” you see.
There are a couple of problems with this process, though. One is that
no humanities publisher that I’ve ever worked with will accept
submissions in LaTeX. I wouldn’t expect them to do so. Publishers in
STEM fields often do because of LaTeX’s vaunted ability to produce
really nice looking mathematical formulas, but such publishers typically
provide very strict templates to their authors. In general, humanities
book publishers like to employ actual book designers to do actual book
designs, and those designers really prefer to start with as little
formatting as possible. This all makes complete sense to me, and even
though I’m a dab hand with TeX at this point, I would never confuse
myself with a professional designer.
So that’s one problem. When the book (or article, or whatever) is
done, I’m going to have to convert it to something else, and that
“something else” is almost always Microsoft Word. Again, I have
no substantive objections to this, but it’s kind of a pain. There are
converters that can get you most of the way there, but I’ve never found
a tool that can go from my lovingly formatted LaTeX to a publisher’s
lovingly insistent style guidelines without having to make a great many
interventions by hand.
The other problem only appears with long-form material, but it had
finally started to annoy me. LaTeX, you see, is slow. If you’re writing
the way I do, you’re essentially introducing a compile step (already an
intolerable thing for most writers, I suspect, and the whole reason for
word processors in the first place). But if the compile is taking, say,
a minute or more, it really starts to feel like it’s interrupting the
flow.
But what’s a writerly nerd to do? No word processor that I am aware
of produces documents as pretty as LaTeX; you’d have to use InDesign or
something like that. And what’s more, the price of all this beauty is a
really tedious conversion process at the very end.
I wasn’t looking around for a solution to these problems, really, but
I managed to stumble on one. Alas, the site that inspired me doesn’t
seem to exist anymore, but basically, it was a grad student who was
procrastinating as I do and had decided to write their thesis in groff.
In what now? You imply that factor for creating UNIX man
pages? That’s the one factor I’d ever used it for, and that use case
appeared to don’t have anything in any respect to do with stunning paperwork.
What I didn’t notice, nonetheless, is that roff is a bit like TeX, in
that it offers you a set of low-level primitives for creating
higher-level macros. The codes for writing man pages are one such set of
macros, however there are others. Together with the reasonably elaborate “mom” macros.
The mother macros (I had by no means heard of them) are mainly these macros
which are supposed for creating stunning long-form paperwork (in PDF or
Postscript) for show, with an emphasis on the form of issues fiction
writers and humanist students have to do. It even makes use of MLA type as its
default reference system! What does it look? Right here’s a web page from the e-book
I’m writing proper now:
Is {that a} drop cap? Why sure it’s!
I believe this seems to be pretty, and to date, mother hasn’t let me down. It’s
true that I don’t sometimes have to do something terribly advanced, however I
insist on having full management of all fonts (the above is in a Garamond I
fairly like), and I completely will need to have: small caps, curly quotes; true
hyphens, en-, and em-dashes; dingbats, fleurons, and different widespread
ornaments; dot leaders (if I’m within the temper); textual content, hanging, and
lowercase figures; the power to set the main manually; a very good
kerning algorithm; dynamic ligatures; true ellipses … nicely it’s reasonably a
lengthy checklist, now that I consider it. Oh, and I additionally want numerous completely different
alphabets. Classical Hebrew, polytonic Greek, and Cyrillic pretty typically,
in addition to all of the diacritics and letterforms of all of the European
languages historical and trendy. Oh, and math. And mother does all of that.
Utilizing groff as a substitute of TeX would possibly appear to be only a little bit of
techno-hipsterism—like a desire for vinyl information or recumbant
bicycles. And actually, since groff is a bit dorky even amongst
these already vulnerable to dorkdom, it is perhaps extra like a desire for
wax cylinders and unicycles. What’s extra, the groff
ecosystem (if that’s even the fitting phrase) is manner smaller than
TeX. I simply put in TexLive on
a reasonably zippy Linux laptop computer, and it took over an hour. Mother is
surprisingly in depth (and extensible), nevertheless it hardly compares to the
a whole lot (hundreds?) of templates and packages accessible to TeX
customers.
However right here’s the factor: It’s quick. Like actually, actually quick.
It didn’t, nonetheless, tackle my first downside, which is the
conversion from stunning paperwork to unadorned Phrase. I’ll focus on my
wonderful answer (learn: my procrastinive peregrinations) to that
downside in Half II.
Key phrases: LaTeX, TeX, groff, mother, typography, writing
Final Modified: 2023-03-24T14:41:23:-0500