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SCRIPT (markup)

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SCRIPT (markup)

SCRIPT, 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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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