Peter Schaffter

• [issue 107] Document Processing with groff and mom

(the words "groff" or "mom" must appear in the subject line of any email sent to this address, otherwise the email will get nuked)

Peter Schaffter is a classical pianist, country songwriter and professional typographer turned writer whose novel, The Schumann Proof (pub. RendezVous Press, Canada), will be on the shelves in the fall of 2004.

An ardent champion of Free Software, he is also the creator of the "mom" macro set for groff. Mom is Peter's way of saying "thank you" to the community of open source developers who made it possible, despite his perpetually impoverished state, to get his hands on some of the most powerful computing tools on the planet. Mom also reflects his interest in software documentation, a subject he considers of primary importance in open source development. In a reversal of normal devlopment procedure, he wrote much of the documentation for mom before implementing the code. "A user's first exposure to a program is usually the documentation," he says, "so why not get it right first? Besides, making a program conform to pre-written docs is a great way to ensure it behaves as advertised."