Nroff Driver Table Maker for USG Systems

[Michael Bloom]

In the README file in article, bruce at bnr-vpa.UUCP writes:

> in the Makefile. The format for Berkeley tab files is different
> and thus this package will not work on Berkely systems without
> substantial hacking.

This is not a material issue.  On a Berkeley system, to make a tab
file you just need to invoke cc with the -c option, and remove
the .o suffix of the resulting a.out format file.  Berkeley nroff
just skips the 32 byte header when reading it in.

This would have been the case with USG nroff if they had not adopted
COFF for System V.  What they do there is to compile it in to
their tab file building program, which just writes out the structure.

To be backwards compatible, what they could have done instead would
have been to write a dummy 32 byte header and then follow coff pointers
from an the file to determine what to write.