🚀 go-pugleaf

Cawf has recently been discussed in the alt.sources* groups.  This posting is
my attempt to clear up any misunderstanding about it.

I began cawf after my search for an adequate manual page formatter for MS-DOS
discovered only Henry Spencer's AWF, and I found it impractical to use AWF on
my 386/16 PC (even with the MKS awk).  I only intended to translate AWF from
awk to C to improve performance.  As others used cawf and requested additional
nroff features, I added them as long as they didn't require that I restructure
cawf, and the effort to install them seemed reasonable to me.  I am indebted
to Henry Spencer for AWF and to those who contributed to cawf's additions.

Cawf's development is finished.  It does an adequate job on most UNIX manual
pages.  I don't think it can be turned into a full nroff clone without major
restructuring.  Besides, what cawf won't do, the full, free nroff replica,
GNU groff, does more suitably.  Cawf is free software, so please accept it for
what it is and don't complain to me about what it is not.  (Even I use nroff
or troff when I have heavy-duty nroff source to format.  :-)

If you still want to look at cawf, it's available via anonymous ftp from
ftp.cc.purdue.edu (128.210.24.1) in pucc/cawf.sh.Z.  The file is a compressed
shell archive.  Examine the file 00diffs to see if the amount of nroff or
troff support in cawf satisfies your needs.

Vic Abell <abe@cc.purdue.edu>