📚Author Typesets Two Novellas With groff, Builds Custom Macro Package

Your text formatter can write a book too

Here's a fun one: a writer produced two full novellas using groff, the old-school Unix typesetting system, and wrote their own macro package to do it. The first book, around 15k words, took over seven months. The second, roughly 40k words, took ten days. The catch? That speed comes from the tooling, not from typing faster. If you already live in plain text, this is the interesting part. The macro package is tiny: .SH for section headers, .PP for normal paragraphs, and .LP for long paragraphs. Each chapter is its own file, like chapter01.groff, and the whole book builds with one command piping macros.groff and the chapter into a PDF at A5 size. No Word, no LaTeX boilerplate. The real craft is in the footer and header. A footer trap pushes the current environment onto a stack, switches to a dedicated footer environment, and prints a centered page number only after page 2. A matching header trap adds top spacing. Both get installed with the wh command, so groff handles page breaks for you.