Skip to content

[Photo by Michelle Dwight.] Jashank Jeremy

The USENET Cookbook

I have a printed copy of The USENET Cookbook (aka alt.gourmand); it is, in my idyllic opinion, the best cookbook ever. This is a local copy of a version I typeset, partially as an exercise to typeset it. It took some whacking to work right (notably locating and fixing ptx, the permutating index tool), but eventually I wound up with working output. It’s also a great demonstrator of how good Troff is as a typesetting system, and how well the UNIX philosophy (do one thing, do it well) applies to typesetting and formatting.

This copy is derived from a copy that I found at ftp://ftp.isy.liu.se/pub/misc/recipes.tar.Z; there’s an extracted version hosted on ibiblio and HTML at lysator.liu.se. I’ve also added the documentation for the recipe management tools and the description of how alt.gourmand works to the introduction section.

Without further ado, here it is. In true UNIX tradition, there’s compress’d PostScript (I was toying with putting the ditroff version up too, but I’m not sadistic enough). If you don’t know what to do with that, use the PDF at the end.