Nroff and SCO Unix

[Ronald S H Khoo]

Chris Lewis <clewis at ferret.ocunix.on.ca> wrote:

> Hi Ronald!

Hi Chris!  Ain't these mailing-list->news gateways annoying ?
All the news-specific headers seem to get munged.  But see the 
discussion in news.software.{b,nntp} about that ... :-)

> [There seems to be a thread of confusion here w.r.t. troff vs. nroff]

You're right.  But why anyone would want to use nroff to drive his
HPLJIII I can't understand.  Now, if we could only get decent graphics
cost down, we could chuck nroff altogether and tell man(1) to use
Xditview instead of col | more......

> I imagine you also have neqn

$ grep neqn /etc/perms/*
EQN	x711	bin/bin		1	./usr/bin/neqn			T01
HELP	f644	bin/bin		1	./usr/lib/help/neqn		T01

Yup.

> C/A/T Troff is also part of the Xenix Text Processing Package.

$ troff
Typesetter busy.

Yup.

> and even groff if you need good HP Laserjet output

H'm.  Maybe I ought to quit waiting on c.s.u and get FTPing then :-)
No nice LaserJet II fonts though :-(  Times ain't too hot on lasers.
I tend to use the PostScript builtin Palatino -- it's thicker than Times,
therefore comes out a lot nicer, especially if you're about to photocopy.
The HP fonts that I do have don't include anything similar.  Sigh.

> As far as I'm aware, SCO's troff is no worse than any other C/A/T troff.

Well, there's the bug with conditionals that upsets -me.  The nice thing
about groff is that James Clark tends to fix macro packages and so you get
a modified -me and -mdoc with groff -- damned useful if you want to
print Berzerkeley manuals.  SCO's troff doesn't like -mdoc at all.
I spent several days hacking at the macros to get useable output, and
ended up hacking the output postscript as well.  Now I use groff for that
stuff and take the performance hit.

So, yes, SCO's troff is older and buggier than the BSD one, so don't expect
it to cope with everything.

> There was a rumor (back in psroff 1.0 days) that there was something
> odd about Xenix Troff's offset and pagelength, but I was unable to
> confirm precisely what the problem was.

Can't tell you.  Seeing that I use A4 anyway, I always have problems with
that kind of thing in any case.  Especially when I'm actually doing
2-up to use up those SCO manual binders which really prefer different
page offsets on odd and even pages ... :-)

> I think you already have all the bits.  *Except* pic and grap.  If you
> need to run pic (line drawing) or grap, I suggest you get groff as
> Ronald has suggested.

No grap with groff.  But the pic is good.

> psroff will do what you want, faster than groff.

Very much faster, especially if, like me, you don't have a floating point
unit.

> Does groff support mm now?

Yes.  James Clark distributes a patch and an edit script with groff.
SCO's -mm is old and slightly buggy, though.  I guess it's not advisable
to start new projects in -mm.  It's dead slow anyhow.

Between James Clark and Chris Lewis, I think troff's life has been
extended beyond expectation.  I have been afraid of TeX taking over,
but I think troff will continue, thanks to the efforts of these two
kind gentlemen, not forgetting the cast of thousands behind the scenes,
of whom I think Ron Florence deserves a special mention for his contribution
to psroff's Laserjet support.


-- 
Ronald Khoo <ronald at robobar.co.uk> +44 81 991 1142 (O) +44 71 229 7741 (H)