M4 Macros for Electrical Circuit Diagrams in GROFF

These are modified m4 configuration files for electric circuit diagrams with groff macros. The original files meant for Latex can be found on https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/graphics/circuit_macros. This repo also includes a modified ms macro package s.tmac that adds a few things I like (Be sure to check s.tmac and the .m4 file in school/ for explanatory comments):

• A modified .NH macro for table of contents generation
• An automatic table of contents generator .tc: Unfortunately, starting today, table of content generation will require two or three parses of the file, the reason being that I output it to a text file that is then formatted on the page where you put the .tc commande. Check school/TD1.m4 for explanatory comments
• Figure titles and auto counter .Fs and .Fe "title"
• Table titles and auto counter, modified .TS and .TE "title"
• Figure and table index .FT f or .FT t, see school/TD1.m4 for comments
• Betters Lists .Ls, .Li, and .Le
• Code blocks in courier .Ps and .Pe
• .Section macro

These things are heavily inspired (some modified, some not) from the extended macro package by Steve Talbott. Found on this O'Reilly book : https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/unix-text-processing/9780810462915/Chapter17.html The book is great, would recommend for people who want to get into text processing and roff in general.

Additionally, I took the liberty of adding a modified version the "[" macro for external links created by Alhadis and provided in his mono macro package, link: https://github.com/Alhadis/Mono

M4 macro documentation

The documentation can be found on https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.604.2295&rep=rep1&type=pdf. While this was intended for Latex, it works alright with groff, you only have to watch out for text formatting differences in labels.

Instructions

If you would like to use my modified ms macros, change your /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/tmac/s.tmac to the one I have here. Note that out.m4 uses these modified macros so trying to use it may generate errors.

1. Put libgen.m4 and libcct.m4 in any directory
2. Put gpic.m4 in any directory (can be same as libgen.m4 and libcct)
3. Change the -I argument inside chroff to the directory containing libcct.m4 and libgen.m4
4. Change gpic.m4 argument in chroff accordingly and with that the setup is done.

To test it:

1. Copy example from documentation or write your own in a .m4 file
2. make sure to include eqn $$ delimiters in that .m4 file (check my out.m4)
3. Run sudo chmod +x chroff
4. Run chroff <name_of_file_without extension>
5. check the PDF

For a quicker example, chmod +x chroff and run chroff out after cloning this repository. voilà.

To do list

s.tmac :

• Make a figure index that is generated after the table index
• Have it so that I can choose which page to print which thing (toc on second page for example)
• Good internal pdf links
• make .tc macro more extensible
• make .FT macro more extensible

.m4 :

• Keep using this until I find something that doesn't work well and fix it
• maybe make better macros ?

Caveats

This was made by an EE student and is a work in progress, so expect spaghetti shell script. I regularly use this for lab reports and will improve it whenever I discover problems.

FAQ

How do I source files for large documents/Books ?

I tried using .so in a .ms file but it didn't seem to work so well, so use the include(file) macro in your main .m4 file, here's the documentation https://www.gnu.org/software/m4/manual/html_node/Include.html#Include