More fonts in troff?

[whm at arizona.UUCP]

I'm sure that everybody that uses troff is irritated by the restriction
placed on the number of fonts (4) that can be mounted at one time.  I
understand that ditroff has a much larger limit, but, like a number
of people, we have ditroff, but don't have it working on anything.

Has anybody hacked up troff to handle more than four fonts?  I know about
the Lincoln-Sudbury nroff enhancements, but I don't believe they're
applicable to troff, i.e., they appear to be nroff-specific.  The version
of troff that we use with our typesetter was hacked up by a long-left
wizard to accommodate 8 fonts at the expense of some size bits.  We'd like
to have vtroff do the same things that our version of troff can do, but
nobody has gotten up the steam to unmodify the portions of our troff that
are typesetter specific.  Does anybody know if vcat is bound to four
fonts, or if it would be fairly easy to make it deal with more fonts if
troff didn't have the intrinsic limitation.

On a slightly different subject, the Berkeley Font Catalog in 2C of
the manual set alludes to digitized bitmap fonts that are available
from Johns Hopkins that are apparently of higher quality than those
that come with 4.1bsd.  Does anybody know anything about the fonts
from Johns Hopkins or about availability of fonts that are of higher
quality than what comes on 4.1[2?]bsd.

I would have posted this to net.text, but it looks like the
group creation message has been lost or hasn't made it out this
far yet.

					Bill Mitchell
					whm.arizona at rand-relay
					{kpno,mcnc,utah-cs}!arizona!whm