V/AT DWB

[Bill Kennedy]

Early last week I posted an article asking if anyone had used the V/AT
troff to successfully format manual pages.  John Sully replied that he
had but had not encountered the difficulties I did with JetRoff.  Rick
Richardson followed up that the symptoms I described were not likely
to be in JetRoff and suggested that Microport could probably make some
money compiling DWB 2.0 for V/AT.

I have since purchased another troff and it confirms Rick's suggestion
that the problems I had were troff related, JetRoff is innocent.  I
found that running the very same source through several different troff's
produced the same result.  The only troff that failed to perform as it
should was Microport V/AT.  Each of the others behaved correctly with a
rather wide variety of pre-processors and post-processors.

I want to make it clear that this is not a flame.  As I pointed out in
an earlier article, I got my money's worth out of nroff and it certainly
did what I wanted.  It's my intent to save someone some bucks if they
really want troff.  I suggest avoiding the Microport offering in that
case.  If there's a leter version than 1.3 (that's what I have on three
diskettes) then perhaps Microport could confirm its functionality with
JetRoff and mark me as out-of-date.
-- 
Bill Kennedy  Internet:  bill at ssbn.WLK.COM
                Usenet:  { killer | att | rutgers | uunet!bigtex }!ssbn!bill