Unix Text Processing

UTP is one of the best books on Unix from a user's perspective. -- Jack Redman

Version 1.0 is released!

The project is now released: the book is ready for use. This is the "UTP Revival" stage, aiming to simply reproduce the original book without changes beyond a few typo fixes. The next stage, "UTP Revisited," aims to modernize the book, covering groff rather than troff and adding new material.

You can choose from several formats:

• groff source (local) (ffii.org, Germany) (514K tar/gz) - type make to build a PostScript file
• gzip'ed PostScript (local) (ffii.org, Germany) (965K)
• PDF (local) (ffii.org, Germany) (1.7MB)

The source files require groff for formatting; we made no effort to make the recreated source (or macros) compatible with the original troff.

About Unix Text Processing

Originally published in 1987, Unix Text Processing (UTP) (written by Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly) provides one of the few comprehensive looks at all the tools involved in a typical troff-based writing workflow. It covers:

• UNIX and troff basics
• text editors (vi, ex, and sed)
• the ms and mm macro packages
• scripting with sh, awk, and sed
• the tbl, eqn and pic preprocessors
• macro writing

UTP was originally published by Hayden Books (which was acquired by Howard W. Sams before the book was actually published). Recently, the authors made the book available at the Open Books Project under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Scanned pages are available in PBM (Portable BitMap) and PDF formats. The original troff markup is lost.

Some members of the groff mailing list transcribed the book, recreated the source code, and we hope to modernize the book later on. Somehow or another, yours truly managed to open his mouth too often (not surprising to anyone who knows me) and I got the job of coordinating the transcription project.

Acknowledgements

• First, a big thanks to the original authors for making the book available in the first place. Nothing else could have happened without that first step.
• Jon Snader provided the scripts to build the table of contents.
• Michael Hobgood and Andreas Kähäri handled proofreading chores.

Individuals who worked on various chapters follow.