2017-12-08
Why? LaTeX is unwieldly, bloated and not installed by default on most
systems. Conversely, groff is almost everywhere, fast and very light
(verging on the skeletal) - but, except for when it's used with the -mom
macros, it suffers from a too terse and antiquated syntax.
These macros are an attempt to bridge the two worlds - make groff into
something humans can use, but without encumbering it overmuch.
They are the fruit of repeated attempts over the course of two months,
starting from the last days of October 2017 - the first iteration was
extremely limited in scope, aimed at the creation of simple (and somewhat
semantic, insofar semantic can be said of groff source) resumes.
The following iterations tried to iron out a couple of problems I found
with the -mom macros - namely, I didn't manage to find a way to have
multiple chapters within the same file, looking how I wanted them to
look. This, together with a first stab at troff preprocessors, thanks
to a Python script I found on GitHub to properly colorize and format code
snippets.
It worked, but it wasn't good enough.
By that point I stumbled across David Given's -meta macros, which were
very useful by demonstrating a few peculiarities of the language I was
still unacquainted with.
Like the fact I could dynamically define new variables, which is how he implemented stacks in his macro package. Idea, promptly stolen.
This iteration went much better than the previous ones, providing me with a great starting point, but I just. Couldn't. Get. The. Bloody. Footnotes. To. Work.
troff's diversions, intuitive they ain't.
I hammered them out, then they broke, then I hammered them out again, then they broke, repeat x1000, then I realized I needed to rewrite the whole thing because I wasn't accounting for footnotes that couldn't fit within the current page.
Fourth iteration, abandoned for a week.
Enter the fifth iteration.
I decided to put every facet of my macro package in its own file, with a primitive version of namespaces to avoid any issues.
I slowly worked my way through the primitives - some aliases to make my life easier, the stack/array macros from before, macros to handle fonts, to set the page size, the margins, and style.
Then, finally, came the footnotes.
The whole thing got re-written from scratch, accounting for overflow,
with proper sizing, with my hard-gotten knowledge of diversions and study
of the -ms and -mm packages.
And.
It.
Worked.
Not flawlessly, not at first, but I chipped at it, tweaked things here
and there, liberally sprinkled the whole things with .tm macros, and
now they do - while being relatively configurable to boot!