Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 (Tek) 9/26/83; site tekchips.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!harpo!ihnp4!zehntel!hplabs!tektronix!tekchips!stevev
From: stevev@tekchips.UUCP (Steve Vegdahl)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: Scribe availability
Message-ID: <684@tekchips.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 9-Apr-84 20:15:05 EST
Article-I.D.: tekchips.684
Posted: Mon Apr  9 20:15:05 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 12-Apr-84 04:50:29 EST
Organization: Tektronix, Beaverton OR
Lines: 61

Scribe is a document compiler that was developed by Brian Reid (now at
Stanford) when he was a CS grad student at Carnegie-Mellon.  Last I knew,
it was being marketed by UniLogic a Pittsburgh company founded by Mike
Shamos, a former CMU professor.  It is available on TOPS-10, TOPS-20,
Unix, and possibly other OS's.

Its document production philosophy is much different than that of Tek or
troff.  Rather then having a large number of commands, each of which performs
a "micro" task, it is primarly declarative, with nested scoping, as in
	@make(thesis)
	(this document is a thesis)

	@enter(itemize)
	a the paragraphs in this scope are itemized lists entries, each
	indented and preceded by a bullet
	@leave(itemize)

Scribe gives the user less control of how he wants his document to appear.
With TeX or troff, you can write a rat's nest of commands to make the
document look almost any way you want it.  Scribe is meant to be used by
non-computer people as well as computer types.  It was also designed to be
device-independent.  The same source code can be used when the output
is a daisy-wheel printer as a laser printer (or even line-printer).
There is a reasonable range of document types that Scribe knows about in
its database (which you may extend once you become a wizard).

Advantages:
	Usable by people of less computer sophistication.  Very few (if any)
		cryptic commands.
	Has extensive bibliography, cross-referencing and indexing, all of
		which are relatively easy to use.
	The same source document can generally be compiled for multiple
		output devices (with some exceptions, of course; can't
		put italics in line-printer output, so it probably will
		underline instead.
	Has an extensible database of document types and devices.

Disadvantages:
	Output does not generally does not look as nice at TeX.
	Some effects are just not possible in Scribe that one could get
		in Tex or troff.
	Facilities for tables and mathematics (ala TBL/EQN) are very weak.
	There are a few bugs that should be easy to fix, that Unilogic has
		been VERY SLOW in responding to.  An example is that in
		citing references, certain styles add a "significant space"
		before the reference, which can make line-justification look
		strange.
	Last I heard, its price was $25,000.

For more information, check out Brian Reid's thesis from CMU, titled
something on the order of "A Document Production Language and its Compiler".

Also, you might look into the work of prof.  Peter Hibbard at CMU, who is
working on a language (MINT) that has many of Scribe's high-level features,
but with (allegedly) fewer of its shortcomings.  In particular, MINT
runs on a personal workstation (written in portable Pascal), and allows
viewing and editing of a document in it "output form", and does something
on the order of retrofitting your changes back into the source code.

		Steve Vegdahl
		Tektronix, Inc.