alt Hacker NewsNovellas with Groff
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I typeset some university work in troff in 1994. The professor I submitted it to was impressed but questioned my sanity in front of half of the class. Not wrong to do so.
Might still have the source code to that work somewhere. And it probably still parses.
Can't remember why I did it but on reflection it might simply have been that LaTeX was not going to fit on my extremely space-constrained Linux machine but troff was already there.
ETA: this sentence made me chuckle. "It's much easier to read without the inline comments:" Oh yes, much ;-)
I was glad to see this page about groff, which is much underrated as a publishing system. The perl script for replacing some markdown markup with chosen groff macros is very interesting. I was however wondering about why the OA chose to write their own macro set rather than simply using the mom macros? Was it simply the need for German markup (and I take the point that languages other than English is an issue)?
I think 9front (Plan 9 fork) dev, cartoonist and fiction writer Stanley Lieber also formats a good part of his stuff with troff, e.g: https://massivefictions.com/2024/06/24/0/
"This book was typeset (troff -ms|lp -dstdout|ps2pdf) in URW Garamond No. 8 by the author, using an MNT Reform laptop running the 9front operating system."
Game of Thrones author George RR Martin writes all his novels on an old MS-DOS machine, not connected to the internet, and he uses WordStar 4.0. [1]
O'Reilly used to typeset their books using troff/groff: http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/PUS/tmac.Gbignuts.G (“O'Reilly & Associates book macros by Steve Talbott, Lenny Muellner”)
IIRC the Go book by Donovan and Kernighan was also written in groff.
I applaud all human-based writing tools. 10 days for 40k words is very impressive!
I suspect many people will prefer HTML for markup. That's why I built EPublish, which is related but for an HTML -> EPub workflow:
At my dayjob, our legacy customer communication generation (for letters and such) has a runoff syntax. It's z/os, so not groff, but something of that lineage. People are still working with those documents to this day, generating millions of them a year. They all look at me funny when I identify it as runoff, everybody else thinks it's something custom in-house.
>Building a world with its own set of rules and history and what not turns out to be very fascinating. ... The length of the stories make proof-reading ridiculously hard.
Sometimes I wonder if writing more short stories would be like playing 9x9 Go games for new authors. It won't exercise the big structural challenges, and it comes with its own challenges, but it does practice a lot of this in a much more digestable size.
As far as world building goes, I think GRRM/Rothfuss/Sanderson style "world building through epic scales of structures and systems kept consistent" is overrated and maybe even Considered Harmful if you look at what it's done to my first two examples. By contrast, Borges does more world building with the ontological tricks in his <20 page short stories than it feels like Rothfuss ever did, in much the same way Tolkien did it with similar tricks. For example, treating himself as a mere translator and even doing some philologist tricks like telling you he's simplifying some names into English (Sam's real name? "Banazîr"), and withholding more information rather than dumping it on you, means that his stories feel like recovered translated works from a world just as real as ours and that's why people still devour The Silmarillion just to get more of a look into it.
Borges would do similar in his short stories, even embracing a little bit of inaccuracies in the (fictional) narrator's account of some events, then hitting you with a surprise endnote at the end of the story with scholia about the provenance of the story given that narrator's mistakes.
Wolfe was famous for it too. Embrace some of the challenge of getting the details right and if you frame it right, it makes it more human and more "real".
FWIW, to use ^H for bold print, set this:
export GROFF_NO_SGR="Y"
setenv GROFF_NO_SGR "Y"
I think it’s fascinating to see all the different ways that techfolk who write fiction set up their writing pipelines. Some people go with a bare-bones coding editor like Vim; others use “pro” tools Scrivener. And then there’s the typesetting pipeline. Using troff is pretty out there.
When I started writing fiction, here’s what I came up with. I write in Google Docs because it’s lightweight, works everywhere, and can easily export to Markdown format. From there, I manage the Markdown source in Git and Emacs. For typesetting—I cannot abide crappy word-processor output—I used to use Pandoc to generate LaTeX markup and run LuaLaTeX to produce PDFs. But that took several seconds. Now, I use Typst to go straight from Markdown to PDF files. It’s pretty much instant.
If you want to see what the output looks like, here’s the first chapter of my current project:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wl4k_rdYGFZp-r5nq864r5CNzD1...
(Notice: This is a typesetting sample, not a writing sample. It’s my W40k-adjacent fanfic, so you have been warned.)
It’s set in 12pt Erewhon, which is an enhanced version of Andrey V. Panov’s Heuristica font family, which extends Robert Slimbach’s Utopia font family. Slimbach is a sublime type designer—he created Minion—and Utopia is one of his early works that is especially spirited.