How to print man pages nicely?

[Chris Lewis]

In article <1991Mar06.221505.19743 at convex.com> tchrist at convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
>From the keyboard of greywolf at unisoft.UUCP (The Grey Wolf):
>:I think he wants a troff output to go to a laser printer.  Unfortunately,
>:most versions of troff are specific to a CAT phototypesetter.  I forget where
>:we got it, but there's something out there called "psroff" (and a host of
>:other assorted utilities) which will make things come out real nice on a
>:laser printer.  It does, however, require a device-independent troff;
>:that is, you need to have a troff that is not device-specific.  And it
>:requires some translational libraries in order to work right.

>The hard part is you need "ditroff".  After that, you can use any of
>several conversion utils to go from device independent troff to
>postscript.  I tried psroff, but after it kept dumping core, I switched to
>tpscript and have been happy ever since.

There seems to be some confusion here.  The version of psroff I wrote
works with CAT troff (aka old troff) only.  And works very well.
It also turns out that there is a "psroff" utility in Adobe's Transcript.
(it wasn't me that named my package psroff, but never mind).  Adobe's
psroff works with ditroff (I think - actually Transcript supports both
CAT troff and ditroff).  tpscript works only with ditroff.

Tom, if my psroff is core dumping I'd like to hear about it.  I try to
support psroff just as well as Larry supports perl.  You report problems
to Larry don't you? ;-)  I know of NO instances where psroff doesn't work -
it is running on a very broad range of machines, all the way from 286's/68K's
with elderly versions of Xenix to MIPS, Sun 4, Ultrix, Vaxen, Apollos, HP's,
RS/6000's, RT's etc.  Generating output for HP Laserjets & clones (w/wo
Postcript cartridges), Postscript printers, and ditroff backends (tpscript,
psdit, jetroff, xtroff/xditview on X windows) and works with Pageview and
Display Postscript amongst other things.  (well, there is one difficulty -
compilers with small case table limits sometimes have problems - but Perl
is worse in that respect)

Every bug report has been fixed and every configuration problem has been
solved - no-one reporting a problem has gone away disappointed in either
the support or psroff itself.  Ask Mark Biggers for one...  I REALLY
do support it - that's why my phone number is in the psroff distribution
and my signature (please don't call during dinner hours ;-)

If you fed my psroff ditroff input, no wonder it's coredumped.
(Other than feeding psroff ditroff by accident, the ONLY core dumps ever
reported to me were about a utility program in psroff release 1, patch 0.
That was fixed in patch 1.  Since then there's been 8 patches to release 1,
and psroff release 2 has gone thru 7 more (psroff 2 was distributed over
alt.sources and didn't get around too widely - the patches were primarily
configuration/installability/odd versions of troff improvements)

Psroff is about to rereleased in its entirety, including full support
(in addition to the previously mentioned stuff) for HP Laserjet III
scaleable fonts and, now psroff supports ditroff *input* too.  As such,
it can be used to replace tpscript, jetroff, psdit and most other
ditroff backends.  With the Laserjet font support and both CAT and ditroff
input capability, it is more fully functional than ANY other commercial or
PD package for driving printers from any kind of troff.

This time I'm going to *try* to change the name to something *other* than
psroff to try to end the confusion.
-- 
Chris Lewis,
clewis at ferret.ocunix.on.ca or ...uunet!mitel!cunews!latour!ecicrl!clewis
Psroff support: psroff-request at eci386.uucp, or call 613-832-0541 (Canada)