Writer's workbench

[rad at mitre-bedford.ARPA]

  I installed wwb on our BSD4.1 VAX in August.  It runs fine, but
there are a couple of things you might want to know about when you
install it.

  First, you won't be able to 'tar' it off tape, as the installation
guide tells you.  At first I tried using 'dd' and editing out the
files one by one, but that was a bit much.  I found by experimentation
that the BSD release, like System III/V, is done in cpio format.

  The release has some nice utilities for configuring itself to your
system (directory locations, etc.).  The actual install is pretty
easy.  One problem you might have is that a couple of routines from the
string(3) library are renamed.  'rindex' is 'strrchr', and 'index' is
'strchr'.  Put a "-Dstrchr=index" and "-Dstrrchar=rindex" in your
makefile CFLAGS line to care of these.  (Thanks to Guy Harris:
[...!rlgvax!guy] for this timely tip.)

  One change that I made and that you may too is the substitution of
the 'more' command for 'cat' in many of the shell scripts that type out
help files.

  As for the 'org' command (bierma at nprdc's earlier response):  the lex
code which diddles with your nroff input expects -mm macros.  Its
output is piped to nroff for formatting with the mm macros.  The bug
section of the manual page admits that the restriction to -mm is a
problem.  I found that by changing the org shell to nroff the output of
the lex program with the -ms macros, I still got fair results.
According to the August Unix Review, the mm macros are a descendant of
the ms macros.  Apparently, they are close enough for org to do its
work.

  One last point.  It was not clear from the advertising literature or
from the conflicting reports we received from the people at Western
Electric that wwb expects and, in some cases, requires [nt]roff input.
We planned to use wwb to analyze documents prepared on another word
processing system (word11).  It works well enough with most commands on
plain text.  (Org is not one of these.)  However, non-nroff users should
not expect full functionality or accuracy.

Dick Dramstad
rad at mitre-bedford.arpa
...!linus!bccvax!rad