On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 8:05 AM Norman Wilson <norman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >[snip] > -mpm (mpm(6) in 10/e vol 1) was a largely ms-compatible > package with special expertise in page layout. > > [snip] > > I think the odds are fairly good (but not 100%) that > groff would do a reasonable job of rendering the papers; > as I said, the hard part is the macro packages. I'm > not sure -mpm ever made it out of Research. If it's the one I'm thinking about, then it did make it out in drips and drabs on Plan 9; it was in the 1st and 2nd Edition distributions. However, to be used to its full effect, -mpm also required a postprocessor, called `pm`, which was written in C++ and built with cfront. Probably for that reason, it was not distributed with Plan 9 3rd edition or later (the later versions of Plan 9, available under an Open Source license, did not include cfront). All of the historical Plan 9 editions are now available under the MIT license and available for download from the Plan 9 Foundation. I just checked and it appears that mpm is in the tar archive for the 2nd edition; one can download that here: https://p9f.org/dl/index.html (It's probably in the tarball for the 1st edition too, but I didn't look.) Note that the source files for sys/src/cmd/pm are all named "whatever.c", but are C++ code in disguise. At one point I took a swing at trying to rewrite it in C, because the idea seemed cool, but other things took precedence and I never got back to it. I haven't tried to build it with a modern C++ compiler, but it probably wouldn't be _that_ much work for someone motivated to do so. - Dan C.
