FOR MANY YEARS I have been using the Unix text-formatter, troff, to produce my technical papers, which I continue to do. Since 1984 I have been the Economics Editor of the Australian Journal of Management and have also been involved with its production. From ten years from 1986 to 1995 we used troff to produce the Journal to camera-ready stage. (See the following article for a discussion of the changes brought in in 1986.)
To impose a consistent style on its production, I wrote several scripts, four of which are available here.
- polish is a sed (= the Unix stream editor) script that does many things to ASCII text. Amongst other things, it breaks lines at new sentences, reduces upper-case acronyms by one point size, adds diacriticals, changes simple quotes into smart quotes, and makes a few simple grammar checks. The best way to see what it does is to run it as a sed script file (or files) on a text file and then compare the output file with the original.
See the files here .
- DropCaps is a troff (= the Unix text formatter, freely available as the GNU groff, a great alternative to TeX and lout, BTW) script which replaces the initial letters of paragraphs immediately after H1 and H2 headings with drop-capitals of specified point size, and automatically flows the text around the new drop cap.
See the file here .
- alphas is an eqn include script. (Eqn is the troff equation module.) Among other things, alphas prints any lower-case Greek letters used in equations as oblique or Italic, since eqn doesn't do this but should. (The GNU groff equivalent, geqn, does, and so these macros would print doubly oblique letters if used with geqn/groff.) There are also some additional symbols defined, but note that your system's non-ASCII troff symbols may be defined differently: edit to taste.
See the file here .
- AJM Header is a set of troff macros used in production of the Australian Journal of Management. They use the Memorandum Macros (mm) of AT&T, and so should be invoked with the troff -mm flag; they should also work with the GNU groff -mgm flag.
See the file here .
Up
Robert Marks, bobm@agsm.edu.au
Last revised: 28 February, 1997.