...making Linux just a little more fun!
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."
(the words "groff" or "mom" must appear in the subject line of any
email sent to this address, otherwise the email will get nuked)
