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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 languages 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's Document Composition Facility (DCF) for IBM z/VM and z/OS systems. SCRIPT was developed for CP-67/CMS by
Stuart Madnick Stuart E. Madnick (born 1944) is an American computer scientist, and professor of information technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology school of engineering. He is the director of Cybersecurity ...
at
MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
, succeeding CTSS RUNOFF. SCRIPT is a ''procedural markup'' language. Inline commands called ''control words'', indicated by a
period Period may refer to: Common uses * Era, a length or span of time * Full stop (or period), a punctuation mark Arts, entertainment, and media * Period (music), a concept in musical composition * Periodic sentence (or rhetorical period), a concept ...
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 Runoff, run-off or RUNOFF may refer to: * RUNOFF, the first computer text-formatting program * Runoff or run-off, another name for bleed, printing that lies beyond the edges to which a printed sheet is trimmed * Runoff or run-off, a stock marke ...
. 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 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 Disk Operating System/360, also DOS/360, or simply DOS, is the discontinued first member of a sequence of operating systems for IBM System/360, System/370 and later mainframes. It was announced by IBM on the last day of 1964, and it was first de ...
, OS/VS1 and OS/VS2, and supported the
IBM 3800 The IBM 3800 is a discontinued continuous forms laser printer designed and manufactured by IBM. It is significant as a product because it was both the first laser printer manufactured by IBM, and the first commercially available continuous forms la ...
. 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 The IBM System/370 (S/370) is a model range of IBM mainframe computers announced on June 30, 1970, as the successors to the System/360 family. The series mostly maintains backward compatibility with the S/360, allowing an easy migration path f ...
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 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. Other BookManager BUILD products for generating text run on Linux, Windows or OS/2 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 directory structure. Different file systems impose different restrictions on filename lengths. A filename may (depending on the file system) include: * name &nda ...
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 *
Typesetting Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other symbols).Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random ...
*
Runoff Runoff, run-off or RUNOFF may refer to: * RUNOFF, the first computer text-formatting program * Runoff or run-off, another name for bleed, printing that lies beyond the edges to which a printed sheet is trimmed * Runoff or run-off, a stock marke ...
*
Scribe (markup language) Scribe is a markup language and word processing system that pioneered the use of descriptive markup. Scribe was revolutionary when it was proposed, because it involved for the first time a clean separation of presentation and content. History Be ...


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/CCONTENTSSH35-0069-07
"CTSS PROGRAMMER'S GUIDE Section AH.9.01, 12/66"
IBM software Typesetting software Markup languages IBM mainframe software