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III. DOCUMENT PREPARATION systems are used extensively for document preparation. There are two major formatting programs, that is, programs that produce a text with justified right margins, automatic page numbering and titling, automatic hyphenation, and the like. nroff-is designed to produce output on terminals and line-printers. troff- (pronounced ``tee-roff'') instead drives a phototypesetter, which produces very high quality output on photographic paper. This paper was formatted with troff. Formatting Packages The basic idea of nroff-and troff-is that the text to be formatted contains within it ``formatting commands'' that indicate in detail how the formatted text is to look. For example, there might be commands that specify how long lines are, whether to use single or double spacing, and what run- ning titles to use on each page. Because nroff-and troff-are relatively hard to learn to use effectively, several ``packages'' of canned formatting requests are available to let you specify paragraphs, run- ning titles, footnotes, multi-column output, and so on, with little effort and without having to learn nroff- and troff. These packages take a modest effort to learn, but the rewards for using them are so great that it is time well spent. In this section, we will provide a hasty look at the ``manuscript'' package known as -ms. Formatting requests typically consist of a period and two upper-case letters, such as .TL, which is used to introduce a title, or .PP- to begin a new paragraph. A document is typed so it looks something like this: .TL title of document .AU author name .SH section heading .PP paragraph ... .PP another paragraph ... .SH another section heading .PP etc. The lines that begin with a period are the formatting requests. For example, .PP-calls for starting a new paragraph. The precise meaning of .PP- depends on what output device is being used (typesetter or terminal, for instance), and on what publication the docu- ment will appear in. For example, -ms-normally assumes that a paragraph is preceded by a space (one line in nroff, 1/2 line in troff), and the first word is indented. These rules can be changed if you like, but they are changed by changing the interpretation of .PP, not by re-typing the document. To actually produce a document in standard format using -ms, use the command troff -ms files ... for the typeset- ter, and nroff -ms files ... for a terminal. The -ms-argu- ment tells troff-and nroff-to use the manuscript package of -2- formatting requests. There are several similar packages; check with a local expert to determine which ones are in common use on your machine. Supporting Tools In addition to the basic formatters, there is a host of supporting programs that help with document preparation. The list in the next few paragraphs is far from complete, so browse through the manual and check with people around you for other possibilities. eqn- and neqn- let you integrate mathematics into the text of a document, in an easy-to-learn language that closely resembles the way you would speak it aloud. For example, the eqn-input sum from i=0 to n x sub i ~=~ pi over 2 produces the output sum from i=0 to n x sub i ~=~ pi over 2 The program tbl- provides an analogous service for preparing tabular material; it does all the computations necessary to align complicated columns with elements of varying widths. refer-prepares bibliographic citations from a data base, in whatever style is defined by the formatting pack- age. It looks after all the details of numbering references in sequence, filling in page and volume numbers, getting the author's initials and the journal name right, and so on. spell-and typo-detect possible spelling mistakes in a document.- spell-works by comparing the words in your docu- ment to a dictionary, printing those that are not in the dictionary. It knows enough about English spelling to detect plurals and the like, so it does a very good job. typo- looks for words which are ``unusual'', and prints those. Spelling mistakes tend to be more unusual, and thus show up early when the most unusual words are printed first. grep-looks through a set of files for lines that con- tain a particular text pattern (rather like the editor's context search does, but on a bunch of files). For example, grep 'ing$' chap* will find all lines that end with the let- ters ing-in the files chap*. (It is almost always a good practice to put single quotes around the pattern you're searching for, in case it contains characters like *- or $- that have a special meaning to the shell.) grep-is often useful for finding out in which of a set of files the ----------- - "typo" is not provided with Berkeley Unix. -3- misspelled words detected by spell-are actually located. diff- prints a list of the differences between two files, so you can compare two versions of something automat- ically (which certainly beats proofreading by hand). wc- counts the words, lines and characters in a set of files. tr-translates characters into other characters; for example it will convert upper to lower case and vice versa. This translates upper into lower: tr A-Z a-z <input >output sort-sorts files in a variety of ways; cref- makes cross-references; ptx- makes a permuted index (keyword-in- context listing). sed-provides many of the editing facili- ties of ed, but can apply them to arbitrarily long inputs. awk-provides the ability to do both pattern matching and numeric computations, and to conveniently process fields within lines. These programs are for more advanced users, and they are not limited to document preparation. Put them on your list of things to learn about. Most of these programs are either independently docu- mented (like eqn-and tbl), or are sufficiently simple that the description in the Programmer's Manual is adequate explanation. Hints for Preparing Documents Most documents go through several versions (always more than you expected) before they are finally finished. Accordingly, you should do whatever possible to make the job of changing them easy. First, when you do the purely mechanical operations of typing, type so that subsequent editing will be easy. Start each sentence on a new line. Make lines short, and break lines at natural places, such as after commas and semi- colons, rather than randomly. Since most people change doc- uments by rewriting phrases and adding, deleting and rear- ranging sentences, these precautions simplify any editing you have to do later. Keep the individual files of a document down to modest size, perhaps ten to fifteen thousand characters. Larger files edit more slowly, and of course if you make a dumb mistake it's better to have clobbered a small file than a big one. Split into files at natural boundaries in the doc- ument, for the same reasons that you start each sentence on a new line. The second aspect of making change easy is to not com- mit yourself to formatting details too early. One of the advantages of formatting packages like -ms-is that they per- mit you to delay decisions to the last possible moment. -4- Indeed, until a document is printed, it is not even decided whether it will be typeset or put on a line printer. As a rule of thumb, for all but the most trivial jobs, you should type a document in terms of a set of requests like .PP, and then define them appropriately, either by using one of the canned packages (the better way) or by defining your own nroff-and troff-commands. As long as you have entered the text in some systematic way, it can always be cleaned up and re-formatted by a judicious combination of editing commands and request definitions.