UNIX Document Processing and Typesetting

Book excerpt: As the mystery of the computer world unfolds with each revelation of its technology, computer users today look forward to a powerful tool to produce a variety of reports and manuscripts. The Unix system provides a variety of powerful text formatters, and one such typesetting tool is called nroff/troff which can help users unlock the resources and the power of a computer system in the preparation of written documents. nroff is a text formatter for daisy-wheel printers and similar devices while troff is a device-independent text formatter for producing typeset output. These two together provide the facilities of a word processor together with formatting features and enable users to produce output that can be printed onto a variety of devices from line printers to typesetters.This book provides a complete description with regard to the capabilities of Unix document processing and typesetting to a variety of users. It also describes in detail the AT&T supported memorandum macros (mm) package which provides a user friendly interface to nroff/troff. The concept and techniques of typesetting are fully illustrated with examples to unveil the power of Unix's document processing capability.