“This tutorial describes how to ease the maintenance of text
or HTML files, using the m4 macro processor.“
“A macro command language is often needed when using a text
editor. Most of them already have such languages among their
features. Even the C compiler provides such a facility for
programmers throught the C preprocessor CPP. When it is used to
maintain configuration files or a small web site, the GNU/m4 macro
processor can efficiently reduce work load. The GNU/m4 macro
processor is part of all linux distributions and is a standard
among Unix users.”
“In the following, we show how to use the GNU/m4 macro processor
to maintain a set of HTML pages for a small web site. This system
will help to keep the whole site coherent. Of course, there are
dozens of ways to obtain the same result with Unix tools; that’s
the beauty of Unix.”