UNIX Text Processing (UTP)

Author(s) : Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly (and the staff of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.)
Consulting Editors : Stephen G. Kochan and Patrick H. Wood
UTP Revival Project Coordinator : Larry Kollar
ISBN : 0-672-46291-5
Pages : 539
Free License : Creative Commons Attribution License 1.0
Publication Date : 1987; Revived to its full glory in 2004
Publisher : Hayden Books

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Book excerpts:

This book shows how UNIX can be used effectively in the preparation of written documents, especially in the process of producing book-length documents, i.e. typesetting. As this book will demonstrate the tools available in the UNIX environment, it is also valuable to examine text processing in terms of problems and solutions: the problems faced by a writer undertaking a large writing project and the solutions offered by using the resources and power of a computer system.

This book implies that an ideal text-processing environment for serious writers should provide tools for saving and managing multiple drafts on disk, not just on paper. It should allow the writer to:
- work on documents of any length;
- save multiple versions of a file;
- save part of the buffer into a file for later use;
- switch easily between multiple files;
- insert the contents of an existing file into the buffer;
- summarize the differences between two versions of a document.
And UNIX typesetting tools can provide those.

The real beauty of UNIX typesetting tools and environment is that nearly all the tools it provides are extensible. Either because they have built-in constructs for self- extension, like nroff and troff's macro capability, or because of the wonderful programming powers of the UNIX command interpreter, the shell.

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