Hi,
I'm going write a small handbook. The typesetting software I'm going to use is troff. There are -ms -me -mm macros for troff. Which one is the most suitable? Thanks!

-Tony

I don't know the troff macro packages that well. But I reviewed my troff documentation to get a sense of the differences.

-ms
This was the first and most widely available macro package.

-mm
This was written by the Unix Support Group and was intended to be an official part of System V. It is much bigger and more powerful than the others. It is also harder to learn. I see that HP-UX has a mm command but SunOS does not. mm is a command to print documented formatted by the -mm macros.

-me
This was written at Berkeley. Its documentation says that it is for technical papers. (The documentation on the other macro packages indicate that they are more general purpose.) This package is much simpler and less powerful. Stuff written in -me will work well in troff or nroff.

So I guess that -ms is probably the best choice for a first package. But if you need very complex stuff, -mm may be best. And if you can settle for some limited capability or need to easily use nroff and troff then -me may be best.

It may be lame, but here is what I do: I find a document that is nicely formatted and I get the source code for it. Then I remove the author's text and put in my own.

Thanks a lot.