Camel Book troff Macros

The Origin of the Macros

• In my first salaried job, I was the most technical member of a technical writing group. We migrated to using troff for our document masters.
• I created a custom macro layer on top of the standard MS macros to streamline our formatting.
• A colleague later left the company, taking my macro package with him, and went to work for Tim O'Reilly.
• Tim used those exact macros to write all the early X11 books, which eventually started the famous Nutshell series.

The Discovery

• A dozen years later, I pitched and won the contract to write the Camel book (Programming Perl).
• I asked the editors how O'Reilly books were produced, and they told me: "We have our own in-house macro package for troff."
• Knowing troff, I was happy to use them. However, when the editor sent over the documentation for their "custom" macros, I immediately recognized them as my own work.
• Upon checking the source code, I confirmed my comments were still intact in the macros.
• When the editor asked if I had questions, I replied: "No, I wrote these macros... I know how they work."