pic problems

[William LeFebvre]

Has anyone out there successfully ported "pic" (the simple graphics
preprocessor for device independent troff) to a Sun?  If you have,
please send me mail telling me what changes you had to make.

If you are about to tell me "Oh I did that and it was easy -- I just
moved the source over and did a make", then try this little test:

	box width 1i height 1i

I bet the box is substantially larger than an inch!

When I tried to get "pic" working on a Sun, I came up against a problem
that I find hard to solve elegantly.  It stems from a poor interaction
between yacc and the routine "makeattr" in misc.c.  Unfortunately, it
is very hard to explain.  I just tried typing out an explanation and
realized that the only people who would understand it would be those
who have had their nose in the code for "pic" in the very recent past.
Ahhh well.

If you are really interested, or, better yet, if you have a solution to
my problem, drop me a line.

                                William LeFebvre
				Department of Computer Science
				Rice University
                                <phil at Rice.arpa>