You tell mom that you want to use the document
processing macros with the
START
macro, explained below. After START,
mom determines the appearance of text following
the markup tags automatically, although you, the user, can easily
change how mom interprets the tags. This gives you
nearly complete control over the look and feel of your documents.
In addition, the typesetting macros, in combination with document
processing, let you meet all sorts of typesetting needs that just
can't be covered by "one macro fits all" markup tags.
How to input mom's macros
Regardless of which way you use mom, the
following apply.
I cannot recommend highly enough that you use an editor that lets you write syntax highlighting rules for mom's macros and inline escapes. I use the vi clone called elvis, and find it a pure joy in this regard. Simply colorizing macros and inlines to half-intensity is enough to make text stand out clearly from formattting commands.
.SUBTITLE "An In-Depth Consideration of the \ Implications of Forty-Two as the Meaning of Life, \ The Universe, and Everything"
.TITLE "My Pulizter Novel" .AUTHOR "Joe Blow" .CHAPTER 1 \# .DOCTYPE CHAPTER .PRINTSTYPE TYPESET \# .FAM P .PS 10 .LS 12 \# .START
groff -mom -l <filename> groff -mom <filename> | lprIn the first, the -l option to groff tells groff to send the output to your printer. In the second, you're doing the same thing, except you're telling groff to pipe the output to your printer. Basically, they're the same thing. The only advantage to the second is that your system may be set up to use something other than lpr as your print command, in which case, you can replace lpr with whatever is appropriate to your box.
Sadly, it is well beyond the scope of this manual to tell you
how to set up a printing system. See the README file for
minimum requirements to run groff with mom.
How to preview documents
Other than printing out hard copy, there are two well-established
methods for previewing your work. Both assume you have a working
X server.
Groff itself comes with a quick and dirty previewer called gxditview. Invoke it with
groff -X -mom <filename>It's not particularly pretty, doesn't have many navigation options, requires a lot of work if you want to use other than the "standard" groff PostScript fonts, and occasionally has difficulty accurately reproducing some of mom's macro effects (smartquotes and leaders come to mind). What it does have going for it is that it's fast and doesn't gobble up system resources.
A surer way to preview documents is with gv (ghostview). This involves processing documents with groff, directing the output to a temporary (PostScript) file, then opening the temporary file in gv. While that may sound like a lot of work, I've set up my editor (elvis) to do it for me. Whenever I'm working on a document that needs previewing/checking, I fire up gv with the "Watch File" option turned on. To look at the file, I tell elvis to process it (with groff) and send it to the temporary file (groff -mom filename > filename.ps), then open the file inside gv. Ever after, when I want to look at any changes I make, I simply tell elvis to work his magic again. The Watch File option in gv registers that the file has changed, and automatically loads the new version. Voilą! -- instant previewing.