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<h1 id="intro" class="docs">What is mom?</h1>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<ul class="no-enumerator" style="margin-left: -2.5em;">
<li ><a href="#intro-intro">Who is mom meant for?</a></li>
<li ><a href="#intro-typesetting">Typesetting with mom</a></li>
<li ><a href="#intro-docprocessing">Document processing with mom</a></li>
<li ><a href="#intro-philosophy">Mom’s philosophy</a></li>
<li ><a href="#intro-documentation">A note on mom’s documentation</a></li>
<li ><a href="#canonical">Canonical reference materials</a></li>
<li ><a href="#macro-args">How to read macro arguments</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="rule-short" style="margin-top: 18px;"><hr/></div>
<h2 id="intro-intro" class="docs">Who is mom meant for?</h2>
<p>
Mom (“my own macros”, “my other macros”,
“maximum overdrive macros”...) is a macro set for
groff, designed to format documents for PostScript output.
She’s aimed at three kinds of users:
</p>
<ol style="margin-top: -.5em; margin-bottom: -.5em;">
<li>Typesetters who suspect groff might be “the right
tool for the job” but who are
frustrated/intimidated by groff’s terse, geeky,
not-always-typographically-intuitive
<a href="definitions.html#primitives">primitives</a>;
</li>
<li>Non-scientific writers (novelists, short story writers,
journalists, students) who just want their work to
look good;
</li>
<li>Newbies to computer typesetting, document processing or
groff who need a well-documented macro set to help them get
started.
</li>
</ol>
<p>
As might be inferred from the above, mom is two macro packages in
one: a set of typesetting macros, and a set of document formatting
macros. The typesetting macros govern the physical aspects
of page layout and provide sane, comprehensible control over
typographic refinements. The document formatting macros let you
focus on a document’s content and logical structure without
worrying about typesetting or page layout at all.
</p>
<p>
Because mom provides both typesetting and document formatting
macros, it’s safe to say she blurs the distinction
between document processing and document design. While
her basic document style come with pretty spiffy defaults
(okay—change “spiffy” to “typographically
professional”), you can easily control how all the various
document elements look: titles, page headers and footers, page
numbering, heads, subheads, footnotes and so on can be made to
come out exactly the way you want. And should you need precise
typographic control over elements in a document that fall outside
the range of mom’s document element tags, you don’t
have to read up on groff
<a href="definitions.html#primitives">primitives</a>
in order to accomplish what you want; the typesetting macros take
care of that.
</p>
<h2 id="intro-typesetting" class="docs">Typesetting with mom</h2>
<p>
Mom’s typesetting macros control the basic parameters
of type: margins, line length, 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.
</p>
<p>
In terms of typographic control, these macros resemble
the commands used on dedicated typesetting computers like
Compugraphics and Linotronics. Most of them simply give access
to groff’s typesetting primitives in a way that’s
consistent and easy to use. A few of them (tabs and indents,
for example) handle fundamental typesetting requirements in ways
radically different from groff primitives.
</p>
<p>
With mom’s typesetting macros, you can, if you wish, create
individual output pages that you design from the ground up.
Provided you have not signalled to mom that you want document
processing (via the
<kbd><a href="docprocessing.html#start">START</a></kbd>
macro; see below), every 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.
</p>
<p>
Years of reading various mailing lists dealing with computer
typesetting (groff, TeX, and friends) have convinced me that no
program can ever replace the human eye and human input when it
comes to high quality typesetting. As of this writing, a thread
on the subject of “micro typography” in groff has been
going on for nearly a month. The reason for the lengthy thread
is obvious; words and punctuation on the printed page are too
variable, too fluid, to be rendered flawlessly by any algorithm,
no matter how clever. (For whatever it’s worth, a similar
problem exists with engraving musical scores by computer.)
</p>
<p>
Mom does not try to solve the problems posed by things like
hanging punctuation, left-margin adjustments for upper case
letters like T and W, and so on. She merely tries to provide
tools that allow knowledgeable typesetters to come up with
solutions to these problems in ways that are easier and more
intuitive than manipulating groff at the
<a href="definitions.html#primitives">primitive</a>
level. As a professional typesetter of more than two decades, and
a writer, I have encountered few situations that cannot be handled
by mom’s typesetting macros.
</p>
<p>
Author’s note: One area where groff itself needs serious
rethinking is in the matter of an algorithm that takes into
account both word and letter spacing when
<a href="definitions.html#just">justifying</a>
lines. At present, only word spacing is adjusted, requiring what
I consider an unnecessary amount of user intervention whenever
letter spacing is required.
</p>
<h2 id="intro-docprocessing" class="docs">Document processing with mom</h2>
<p>
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 don’t want your heads
underlined, or you want them bigger/smaller, or you’d prefer
them to be in a different font, or you’d rather they were
flush left instead of centred, you can make the changes easily
and have them apply to the whole document. Temporary and one-off
changes are easy, too.
</p>
<p>
Mom has some nifty 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—
<a href="docprocessing.html#printstyle"><kbd>PRINTSTYLE TYPEWRITE</kbd></a>—
that changes typeset documents into ones that would make your
high-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.
</p>
<h2 id="intro-philosophy" class="docs">Mom’s philosophy</h2>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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, it seems, always need to be
tweaked, either to satisfy a typographic whim or to clarify some
aspect of their content.
</p>
<p>
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
<a href="definitions.html#primitives">primitives</a>
and
<a href="definitions.html#inlines">inline escapes</a>
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 in-line as an encrypted
password. This does not make for happy-camper writers, who either
find themselves stuck with a document formatting style they
don’t really like, or are forced to learn groff from the
ground up—a daunting task, to say the least.
</p>
<p>
Mom aims to make creating documents a simple matter, but with
no corresponding loss of user control. The document processing
macros provide an excellent set of defaults, but if something is
not to your liking, you can change it. And in combination with
the typesetting macros, you have all the tools you need to massage
passages and tweak pages until they look utterly professional.
</p>
<p>
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, typographically and
structurally, easier to decipher.
</p>
<p>
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 printed output, although with
<a href="docprocessing.html#printstyle"><kbd>PRINTSTYLE TYPEWRITE</kbd></a>
she produces acceptable terminal copy. She makes no attempt to be
compatible with older versions of troff.
</p>
<p>
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 desirable (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.
</p>
<h2 id="intro-documentation" class="docs">A note on mom’s documentation</h2>
<p>
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, new to computers? At some point, one
has to decide whom the documentation is for. Making the wrong
decision can mean the difference between a program that gets used
and a program that gets tossed.
</p>
<p>
Mom’s documentation assumes users know their way around
their own operating system (basic file management, how to invoke
commands, how to use a text editor, etc). I use GNU/Linux,
and while the documentation may exhibit a GNU/Linux bias, mom
and groff can, in fact, be used on a variety of other popular
operating systems, including the one from Redmond, Virginia, USA.
</p>
<p>
The documentation further assumes they 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.
</p>
<h2 id="canonical" class="docs">Canonical reference materials</h2>
<p>
The canonical reference materials for groff are
<strong>cstr54</strong> (a downloadable PostScript copy of which
is available
<a href="http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/">here</a>)
and the <strong>troff</strong> and <strong>groff_diff</strong>
manpages. Another excellent source of information (maybe the best)
is the groff info pages, available by typing
<kbd>info groff</kbd>
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 <kbd>man groff_char</kbd>.
</p>
<p style="margin-top: 24px;">
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.
<i>Mea culpa.</i>
</p>
<div class="box-tip">
<p class="tip-top" style="padding-bottom: 9px;">
<b>Note:</b> 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.
</p>
</div>
<div class="box-tip">
<p class="tip-top" style="padding-bottom: 9px; text-indent: 0px;">
<strong>Addendum:</strong> As of version 1.4-a, the main macro
file, om.tmac, is now 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.
</p>
</div>
<div class="rule-short" style="padding-top: 6px; padding-bottom: 3px;"><hr/></div>
<h2 id="macro-args" class="docs">How to read macro arguments</h2>
<p>
The concise descriptions of macros in this documentation typically
look like this:
</p>
<div class="box-macro-args">
Macro: <b>MACRO_NAME</b> <kbd class="macro-args">arguments</kbd>
</div>
<p>
<kbd>arguments</kbd> lists the macro’s
arguments using conventions that should be familiar to anyone who
has ever read a manpage. Briefly:
</p>
<ol>
<li>Macro arguments are separated from each other by spaces.</li>
<li>If an argument is surrounded by chevrons
(<kbd>< ></kbd>), it’s a description
of the argument, not the argument itself.
</li>
<li>If an argument begins with or is surrounded by double-quotes, the
double quotes MUST be included in the argument.
</li>
<li>If the user has a choice between several arguments, each of the
choices is separated by the pipe character
(<kbd>|</kbd>), which means “or.”
</li>
<li>Arguments that are optional are surrounded by square brackets.</li>
<li><kbd><off></kbd> in an argument list means that any
argument other than those in the argument list turns the
macro off.
</li>
</ol>
<h3 id="toggle-macro" class="docs">Toggle macros</h3>
<p>
Some macros don’t require an argument. They simply start
something. When you need to turn them off, the same macro with
<em>any</em> argument will do the trick. That’s right:
<em>any</em> argument (in caps, lowercase or a mixture
thereof). This permits choosing whatever works for you:
<kbd>OFF, end, Quit, Q, X</kbd>... Hell, it
could even be <kbd>I_love_mom</kbd>.
</p>
<p>
Since these macros toggle things on and off, the argument list
simply reads <kbd>toggle</kbd>.
</p>
<div id="examples" class="examples-container">
<h2 class="docs" style="margin-top: .5em;">Examples</h2>
<div class="examples">Example 1: An argument requiring double-quotes</div>
<div class="box-macro-args" style="max-width: 684px;">
Macro: <b>TITLE</b> <kbd class="macro-args">"<title of document>"</kbd>
</div>
<p>
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:
<br/>
<span class="pre-in-pp">
.TITLE "My Pulitzer Novel"
</span>
</p>
<div class="examples" style="margin-top: -1em;">Example 2: A macro with required and optional arguments</div>
<div class="box-macro-args" style="width: 684px;">
Macro: <b>TAB_SET</b> <kbd class="macro-args"><tab number> <indent> <length> [ L | R | C | J [ QUAD ] ] </kbd>
</div>
<p>
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:
<br/>
<span class="pre-in-pp">
.TAB_SET 3 6P 3P
</span>
The remaining two arguments are optional. The first is a
single letter, either <kbd>L, R, C</kbd> or
<kbd>J</kbd>. The second, which is itself
optional after <kbd>L, R, C</kbd> or
<kbd>J</kbd>, is the word <kbd>QUAD</kbd>.
Therefore, depending on what additional information you wish to
pass to the macro, you could enter:
<br/>
<span class="pre-in-pp">
.TAB_SET 3 6P 3P L
</span>
or
<br/>
<span class="pre-in-pp">
.TAB_SET 3 6P 3P L QUAD
</span>
</p>
<div id="toggle-example" class="examples" style="margin-top: -1em;">Example 3: A sample toggle macro:</div>
<div class="box-macro-args" style="max-width: 684px;">
Macro: <b>QUOTE</b> <kbd class="macro-args">toggle</kbd>
</div>
<p>
<kbd>QUOTE</kbd> 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.
<span class="pre">
.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
</span>
</p>
<p>
Alternatively, you could have turned the quote off with
<kbd>END</kbd>, or <kbd>X</kbd>, or something else.
</p>
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