Typing <tt> xxx </tt> around everything that needs it is a bore.  The
shortened form <tt/xxx/ is helpful, but no use if `xxx' includes a `/'
character.  Probably half the things I want to appear in fixed-width
font are pathnames ...

I preprocess my HOWTOs with this perl one-logical-liner, which allows
me to write

 <tt,/usr/doc/howto/, 

and have it transformed to

 <tt>/usr/doc/howto</tt>

In fact, it works for any other tag as well.  If you have a pressing
need to typeset lots of italic forward slashes, it will cope with
<em,////////, no problem.  A semi-reasonable example of this is

 <tt,/usr/lib/gcc-lib/,<em,target,<tt,/,<em/version/<tt,/, 

perl -e \
'undef $/; $_=<STDIN>;s@<([a-z]+),([^,]+),@<$1>$2</$1>@gs; print' \
<foo-howto.sgmlp >foo-howto.sgml

(actually, I have a Makefile which deals with all my sgml processing.
Don't forget to double the $ signs if you do likewise)
Daniel Barlow <daniel.barlow@sjc.ox.ac.uk>
