Speedup idea for troff/nroff

[#Bill.Stewart]

In article <94 at winchester.UUCP> mash at winchester.UUCP (John Mashey) writes:
>In article <387 at ivax.doc.ic.ac.uk> lmjm at doc.ic.ac.uk (Lee McLoughlin) writes:
>>This is a speedup idea for troff and its relatives .....
>>Most of the local use of troff is with a few standard packages (man,
>>ms, me).  Would it be possible to use the unexec routine to create a
>>preloaded version by running troff to read in the macro package
>>.....
>the nroff/troff of System V have done this for many years: one command
>lets you create a file that has all of the necessary state information,
>normally after the unchanging part of the macro package has been processed.
>Then, invoking {n|t}roff -cx gets the "compressed" form of the macro package.
>I think Fred Dalrymple did this [but somebody correct me if I'm wrong,

Someone else wrote that DWB 2.0 versions are twice as fast but don't
have this capability.  Another option, for monospaced output, is to use
sroff instead of nroff.  Sroff is signifcantly faster than nroff but
has a more limited macro capability.  There's a -mm package that does a
fairly complete emulation of the nroff -mm macros, but doesn't support
tbl or eqn.  Now that we have laser printers, I mostly use troff, but
sroff is useful on PCs with limited horsepower, and for previewing
documents on a terminal.
	Has anybody developed a -man macro package for sroff?
				Thanks;
-- 
# Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G-202, Holmdel NJ 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcs