4 ms·

Scribe: A document specification language and its compiler (1980) [pdf]

29 points by todd8 10y ago

todd8 10y ago
Brian Reid won the Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award for this in 1982.
ScottBurson 10y ago
The importance of Scribe was that it introduced semantic markup. Previously, formatters -- at least, all those I ever used or heard of -- had only physical markup commands: change to this font, indent by this much, insert this much vertical space, etc. Semantic markup, in contrast, specifies the intent rather than the details: emphasize this phrase, make a heading, make a numbered or bulleted list, etc. While Scribe itself was never used very widely -- it ran on PDP-10s, as I recall, and was quite slow -- Reid's ideas influenced a number of other designs, most notably those of HTML and LaTeX. (Less notably, but I can't resist mentioning: there was a microcomputer re-implementation of much of Scribe that I did some work on in 1980-1983, that was initially called Scribble, then the FinalWord formatter, and eventually the Borland Sprint formatter [0] [1].) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(markup_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(markup_language) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor)
- todd8 10y ago
  I used MOTU's FinalWord for my research writing in grad school. It was so much better than the alternatives! Thanks.
- lispm 10y ago
  The Symbolics Lisp Machine came with a Scribe implementation in Lisp. Also the CMU CL documentation was written in Scribe, IIRC.
  - groovy2shoes 10y ago
    IIRC, the first edition of CLtL was written in Scribe as well, before being re-rendered in LaTeX for the second edition.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
wsh 10y ago
Two interesting documents produced with Scribe were the 1985 editions of Adobe’s red and blue books, the PostScript Language Reference Manual and PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook, published by Addison-Wesley. The colophon in the blue book explains the publishing workflow: Camera-ready copy for this book was created entirely with PostScript and printed on a Linotron 101 at Adobe Systems Incorporated. The book was created with the aid of the Scribe Document Production System (a product of Unilogic, Ltd.) as a Scribe document definition. The illustrations were PostScript program segments which Scribe integrated and placed on the pages along with the formatted text portions. Successive drafts of the book were processed with Scribe, each time generating a single PostScript print file. The book was proofed when needed by printing the file on an Apple LaserWriter PostScript printer. The final version was printed without modification on a Linotype Linotron 101 typesetter and delivered to Addison-Wesley. No manual paste-up of any kind was required.
dano 10y ago
I used Scribe extensively under Tops-20 and printed the results on a Diablo 630. Here is an excerpt from the top of one of my theses just for reference. @make(report) @style(paperwidth 8.5 inches, paperlength 9.5 inches) @style(leftmargin 1.0 inches, rightmargin 1.0 inches) @style(topmargin 0.5 inches, bottommargin 1.0 inches) @pageheading(right "@ref(page)") @style(spread 1, indentation 5) @style(spacing 2)

29 points by todd8 10y ago

todd8 10y ago

Brian Reid won the Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award for this in 1982.

The importance of Scribe was that it introduced semantic markup. Previously, formatters -- at least, all those I ever used or heard of -- had only physical markup commands: change to this font, indent by this much, insert this much vertical space, etc. Semantic markup, in contrast, specifies the intent rather than the details: emphasize this phrase, make a heading, make a numbered or bulleted list, etc. While Scribe itself was never used very widely -- it ran on PDP-10s, as I recall, and was quite slow -- Reid's ideas influenced a number of other designs, most notably those of HTML and LaTeX. (Less notably, but I can't resist mentioning: there was a microcomputer re-implementation of much of Scribe that I did some work on in 1980-1983, that was initially called Scribble, then the FinalWord formatter, and eventually the Borland Sprint formatter [0] [1].) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(markup_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(markup_language) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor)

todd8 10y ago
I used MOTU's FinalWord for my research writing in grad school. It was so much better than the alternatives! Thanks.
lispm 10y ago
The Symbolics Lisp Machine came with a Scribe implementation in Lisp. Also the CMU CL documentation was written in Scribe, IIRC.
- groovy2shoes 10y ago
  IIRC, the first edition of CLtL was written in Scribe as well, before being re-rendered in LaTeX for the second edition.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

wsh 10y ago

Two interesting documents produced with Scribe were the 1985 editions of Adobe’s red and blue books, the PostScript Language Reference Manual and PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook, published by Addison-Wesley. The colophon in the blue book explains the publishing workflow: Camera-ready copy for this book was created entirely with PostScript and printed on a Linotron 101 at Adobe Systems Incorporated. The book was created with the aid of the Scribe Document Production System (a product of Unilogic, Ltd.) as a Scribe document definition. The illustrations were PostScript program segments which Scribe integrated and placed on the pages along with the formatted text portions. Successive drafts of the book were processed with Scribe, each time generating a single PostScript print file. The book was proofed when needed by printing the file on an Apple LaserWriter PostScript printer. The final version was printed without modification on a Linotype Linotron 101 typesetter and delivered to Addison-Wesley. No manual paste-up of any kind was required.

dano 10y ago

I used Scribe extensively under Tops-20 and printed the results on a Diablo 630. Here is an excerpt from the top of one of my theses just for reference. @make(report) @style(paperwidth 8.5 inches, paperlength 9.5 inches) @style(leftmargin 1.0 inches, rightmargin 1.0 inches) @style(topmargin 0.5 inches, bottommargin 1.0 inches) @pageheading(right "@ref(page)") @style(spread 1, indentation 5) @style(spacing 2)