Re: troff Memorandum Macros documentation derived from the paper "MM - Memorandum Macros"

[Keith Marshall]

On 20/07/2021 15:19, James K. Lowden wrote:
> [...snip...]
> 
> A question came up on reddit that might act as a tie-breaker for 
> you. (!)  It was: how to automatically increment a list with letters?
> I don't use the style much, but if you want
> 
>       1.  foo
>               a) bar
>               b) baz
>       2.  fubar
> 
> I don't know how that would be done.  

I too use ms ... primarily because it appeared to have a learning curve
which would be less steep than that for mm; having found it to produce
output of much higher quality than /anything/ achievable with /any/
WYSIWYG (which it /never/ is) word processing software, I've stuck with
it ... my use case has been to produce technical papers documenting
industrial process control strategies, with pic to incorporate process
flow diagrams, (simplified process and instrumentation diagrams), eqn to
insert mathematical formulae, and the occasional tbl table.

The above example is simply a pair of nested lists.  It has been several
years, but some of the technical papers which I have produced did use
just such a construct.  It is a simple matter of using two separate
auto-incrementing number registers; one to keep track of the outer list;
the other to track the inner.  Use the ".af" request, to assign an
appropriate format for each.  Use the ".IP" macro (in ms) to introduce
each list item; include the appropriate number register, along with any
desired punctuation, as the .IP "marker" argument.

-- 
Keith.