This relatively short book, which concentrates mainly on the nroff and troff formatters and the -ms macro package, provides a good introduction to the basic UNIX document preparation tools for readers who do not need to know all the finer details. It does, however, also mention some of the simple UNIX tools for text handling and searching, and assumes that readers are familiar with the basics of the UNIX operating system and one of the UNIX editors ed or vi. The first 20 pages, for example, contain references to mail, write, who, cd, chmod, ln, cat, diff, grep, make, and several other UNIX commands.

The book is divided into three main parts: “The Basics” (64 pages), “Sample Documents” (74 pages), and “References” (50 pages). The first of these, “The Basics,” discusses planning, the use of files, creating a source document, and formatting and printing a document. The material on creating a source document covers a minimal subset of nroff/troff requests and -ms macros.

The second part, “Sample Documents,” provides useful examples of typical documents. There are nine of these: memo and status report (covered together), business letter, resume, title page, outline, research paper, periodical article, and software specification. In each case the source document and corresponding output are given, together with a set of notes explaining the formatting requests and macros used. The explanations do not cover all the background principles or details of the formatting facilities. As a result, readers are presented with standard recipes for documents and enough explanation to allow them to make minor variations with a reasonable degree of confidence.

The final part, “References,” contains four appendices that fill in many of the details missing from the earlier parts. In addition to introducing further formatting features, such as page layout details, number/string registers, and keeps, they provide checklists of macros and registers, a very brief comparison (3 pages) of the -ms, -me, and -mm macros, and a slightly longer introduction (8 pages) to producing tables using the tbl preprocessor.

The authors take their own advice on clarity of organization to heart. The style is relatively terse. It frequently takes the form of a list of items to be discussed, followed by a short section on each item. The book’s main drawback is its lack of discussion of general principles and background details of nroff/troff facilities, but you cannot expect everything to be covered in 200 pages.

In summary, this book is a good one for readers with relatively modest formatting needs who want to get started quickly and are happy to use or adapt standard recipes. Readers who like to understand all the details will find it inadequate and occasionally frustrating.