Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!lll-crg!styx!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!decvax!decwrl!recipes From: reid@decwrl (Brian Reid) Newsgroups: mod.recipes Subject: Answers to common questions about mod.recipes (Updated 24 Nov 86) Message-ID: <6637@decwrl.DEC.COM> Date: Fri, 28-Nov-86 04:13:11 EST Article-I.D.: decwrl.6637 Posted: Fri Nov 28 04:13:11 1986 Date-Received: Fri, 28-Nov-86 19:43:44 EST Sender: recipes@decwrl.DEC.COM Organization: DEC Western Research Laboratory, Palo Alto, CA Lines: 95 Keywords: automatic monthly posting 8 of 8 Approved: reid@decwrl.UUCP These are the most common questions about mod.recipes, and their answers. * What macro package do these recipes use? What text formatter? I've tried troff -ms and troff -mm and other troff options and nothing works. The recipes use a combination of the "man" macro package and their own special macros. All of the troff macros and shell scripts that you need to print the recipes are distributerd as part of the "software package" in the automatic monthly (quarterly outside North America) posting. * I have the software all installed, but the index seems to be terribly broken. Everything else works fine; what is the matter with the index? The recipe titles are coming out in random order, with the words interchanged, and there are no page numbers. Help! The index is not broken; you just don't know how to read it. The recipe software uses the same kind of index that the Unix manuals use. In fact, the recipe index is generated using the same program that generates the index to the Unix manuals. This index is called a "permuted index". Sometimes it is also called a "KWIC index". "KWIC" is an acronym for "Key Word In Context." Each recipe title is indexed under every major word in the title. For example, if the previous sentence were to be indexed, it would be indexed under "recipe", "title", "indexed", "major", and "word". There would be 5 separate index entries for that one sentence, each placed in proper alphabetical order according to the key word being indexed. Because titles can be very long but paper has only a certain width, the software that produces permuted indexes must make some decisions about how much of the title to show in each index entry. The Unix "ptx" program, which is the one that produces the recipe index, puts about a dozen words of the title in each index line. The word being indexed falls in the center. * Why doesn't the cookbook have page numbers? This is a nuisance. The cookbook does not have page numbers because there are 5 new recipes issued each week, and the page numbers would change every week. Instead they are indexed by the keyword name of the recipe. We expect that you will keep your recipes in a notebook, filed alphabetically by keyword name. These names will not change from one week to the next, unlike page numbers. Another answer to this question, equally true, is that the cookbook does not have page numbers because the Unix manuals don't have page numbers, and the cookbook is printed using the Unix manual software. * I am new to the network. Is there an archive of back recipes? I would like to get a complete collection. The collection of back recipes is too big to send via computer mail (It fills about 1.3 megabytes per year; mod.recipes began on December 1, 1985). The full collection of back recipes is available on the ARPANET for anonymous ftp from host decwrl.dec.com as ~/recipes/*. There is not currently an archive server in the U.S. available for sites that do not have ARPAnet access. When I get the time I will install one, but it's trickier than you think because of flow-control problems. * Why are the recipes encoded in some arcane text-formatting language like Troff. Why don't you use TeX, or something more widely available? TeX can't format for the line printer, for one thing. TeX can only format in TeX fonts for TeX printers, and despite what you might think about its wide availability, there are a lot of people out there who print these recipes on dot-matrix printers and the like. USENET is primarily a Unix phenomenon, and most Unix sites have some form of troff or nroff. It is true that there are some sites on the network that are not UNIX sitres and do not have nroff, but often they don't have TeX either. The combination of posting troff versions of the recipes and posting cleartext versions seems to reach the widest possible audience. * Every month I see a message saying that the software has been posted, but it never reaches my site. What is the matter and what can you do about it? The monthly postings of software are posted with an "na" distribution. If you are in North America and do not receive them, it means that somewhere on your news feed path somebody is not passing the "na" distribution. The most common source of this problem is AT&T sites in New Jersey. There's usually not a lot you can do about this, except to try to find a news feed that doesn't depend on a poorly-managed machine.