SCRIPT,
[Stuart E. Madnick and Allen G. Moulton (1968) IEEE Transactions on Engineering Writing and Speech, Vol. EWS-11, No. 2, pp. 92-100.] any of a series of text
markup language
A markup language is a Encoding, text-encoding system which specifies the structure and formatting of a document and potentially the relationships among its parts. Markup can control the display of a document or enrich its content to facilitate au ...
s starting with Script under
Control Program-67/Cambridge Monitor System (CP-67/CMS) and Script/370 under
Virtual Machine Facility/370 (VM/370) and the
Time Sharing Option (TSO) of
OS/VS2; the current version, SCRIPT/VS, is part of
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
's Document Composition Facility (DCF) for
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
z/VM and
z/OS
z/OS is a 64-bit operating system for IBM z/Architecture mainframes, introduced by IBM in October 2000. It derives from and is the successor to OS/390, which in turn was preceded by a string of MVS versions.Starting with the earliest:
...
systems. SCRIPT was developed for
CP-67/CMS by
Stuart Madnick at
MIT, succeeding
CTSS RUNOFF.
SCRIPT is a ''procedural markup'' language. Inline commands called ''control words'', indicated by a
period in the first column of a logical line, describe the desired appearance of the formatted text. SCRIPT originally provided a ''2PASS'' option to allow text to refer to variables defined later in the text, but subsequent versions allowed more than two passes.
History
In 1968 "IBM contracted Stuart Madnick of MIT to write a simple document preparation ..."
to run on
CP/67. He modeled it on MIT's
CTSS RUNOFF.
In 1974, William Dwyer at Yale University ported the CP-67 version of Script to the
Time Sharing Option (TSO) of
OS/360 under the name NSCRIPT. The
University of Waterloo
The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also op ...
rewrote and extended NSCRIPT as Waterloo SCRIPT, also in 1974, making it available for free to CMS and TSO users for several releases before eventually charging for new releases.
By 1978, IBM's Script/370, running on VM/CMS, had evolved into Document Composition Facility (DCF), supporting SCRIPT/VS on CMS,
DOS/VS,
OS/VS1 and
OS/VS2, and supported the
IBM 3800.
In addition, there was a
PC/
MS-
DOS version called SCRIPT/PC.
Native SCRIPT control words
Native Script control begin with a period and have a space prior to operands. They normally begin in column 1, but you may code multiple control words, separated by semicolons, on a single line.
The description and table below refer to selected control words in DCF; older versions are similar.
SCRIPT allows space units in control words to be specified in a number of units including inches, centimeters, millimeters,
picas,
ciceros, m-spaces, or ''device units'' (
pels at the current device resolution). Vertical space units are assumed to be ''lines'' unless otherwise specified.
SCRIPT macros
Script includes a facility for user-defined macros and for automatically reading a profile containing macro definitions and other commands. Several packages for semantic tagging, including
GML and
EasyScript, are built on top of this facility.
Generalized Markup Language
IBM's
Generalized Markup Language (GML) is a ''descriptive markup'' layer describing the logical structure of a document. Both SCRIPT/VS and the GML Starter Set are part of IBM's Document Composition Facility (DCF), used in the
System/370 platform and successors. The tag sets of the
BookMaster[
] and
BookManager BUILD/MVS products are built on a foundation of the GML Starter Set syntax and implementation.
The
Standard Generalized Markup Language
The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on two postulates":
* Declarative: Markup should de ...
(SGML) is a descendant of GML. While DCF does not directly handle SGML, there is an SGML translator available as a separate product.
EasyScript
EasyScript is a set of macro definitions and profiles included with Script/370 Version 3 that implements a primitive version of GML. Tags are variables whose values have been set to control words, allowing multiple tags in a single line.
.ez on
&P.This is a paragraph.
&N1.First item
&N2.First subitem
&N2.Second subitem
&N1.Second item
is roughly equivalent to
This is a paragraph
#First item
##First subitem
##Second subitem
#Second item
GML Starter Set (GMLSS)
The GML Starter Set (GMLSS) is a set of macro definitions and profiles that implements a set of tags that has more of a semantic orientation than the raw Script/VS control words. Tags begin with a colon and end with a period, and may contain attributes between the name and the closing period; a line may contain multiple tags.
BookMaster
Bookmaster is an IBM product, "designed for high-volume in-house publishing applications", that extends the
GML Starter Set of DCF. It consists of "a rich set of GML vocabulary for creating complex document layouts." Bookmaster runs under the
z/VM and
z/OS
z/OS is a 64-bit operating system for IBM z/Architecture mainframes, introduced by IBM in October 2000. It derives from and is the successor to OS/390, which in turn was preceded by a string of MVS versions.Starting with the earliest:
...
operating systems.
[
]
BookManager
BookManager is a family of products for producing and reading online books. BookManager BUILD/MVS and BookManager BUILD/VM are layered on top of SCRIPT and BookMaster and can run on z/VM and z/OS
z/OS is a 64-bit operating system for IBM z/Architecture mainframes, introduced by IBM in October 2000. It derives from and is the successor to OS/390, which in turn was preceded by a string of MVS versions.Starting with the earliest:
...
. Other BookManager BUILD products for generating text run on Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
, Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
or OS/2
OS/2 is a Proprietary software, proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was created and initially developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, ...
and convert files produced by various word processors to BookManager format. BookManager ''Read'' products for viewing text run on a variety of systems. BookManager ''BookServer'' is a multi-platform system to "serve your electronic books to HTML browsers."
BookManager electronic documents typically have filenames
A filename or file name is a name used to uniquely identify a computer file in a file system. Different file systems impose different restrictions on filename lengths.
A filename may (depending on the file system) include:
* name – base ...
ending with the extension .BOO. IBM offers several no charge tools to work with and read BookManager documents including a reader/viewer called IBM Softcopy Reader. An independent developer, Ken Bowling, created and released software that uses IBM's BookManager code libraries to convert BookManager documents to PDF.
See also
* Markup language
A markup language is a Encoding, text-encoding system which specifies the structure and formatting of a document and potentially the relationships among its parts. Markup can control the display of a document or enrich its content to facilitate au ...
* Typesetting
Typesetting is the composition of text for publication, display, or distribution by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other ...
* Runoff
* Scribe (markup language)
References
External links
*SH35-0070-07
*{{cite book, publisher=IBM Corporation, title=DCF V1R4.0: SCRIPT/VS Text Programmer's Guide, year=1999, url=http://publibfp.dhe.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr/BOOKS/dsmp7m00/CCONTENTS, archive-url=https://archive.today/20121216085212/http://publibfp.dhe.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr/BOOKS/dsmp7m00/CCONTENTS, url-status=dead, archive-date=December 16, 2012SH35-0069-07
"CTSS PROGRAMMER'S GUIDE Section AH.9.01, 12/66"
IBM software
Typesetting software
Markup languages
IBM mainframe software