Broff and a proposed net project

[cak at purdue.ARPA]

From:  Christopher A Kent <cak at purdue.ARPA>

Left unsaid in all this discussion (so far) is the fact that macros
are wonderful (all those who disagree may stop reading here). The
standard example is "I have this paper and I want to submit it
to CACM and IEEE Spectrum but they have different formats and I
don't want to type it twice". (Or maybe that should be CACM and Byte.)
With troff, you write the thing using macros, and run it through troff
twice, once with one set of definitions, once with the other.

This is extremely powerful! I first learned about text processing
with nroff/troff, and when I discovered Bravo (a what-you-see
editor/formatter for Altos) I couldn't understand how they had
missed this. Turns out that a follow-on, BravoX, attacked just
this dilemma. They have what-you-see, but there are magic marks
in the text that mark the beginning of a paragraph or what have you,
and you can modify a description file and reformat.

Commercial word processors don't deal with this because most business
applications don't need it. It's just another case of analyzing
your target market's needs.

Cheers,
chris