cawf (man page formatter)

Thread View: alt.sources.d

4 messages

[T] Back to Threads [V] Tree View [G] Group Articles

4 total messages Started by Vic Abell Mon, 28 Dec 1992 19:39

#1565

Author: Vic Abell
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 19:39

25 lines
1910 bytes

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>

Re: cawf (man page formatter)

#1570

Author: Peter da Silva
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 03:33

12 lines
928 bytes

In article <BzzIM1.MEM@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> abe@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Vic Abell) writes:
> Cawf's development is finished.  It does an adequate job on most UNIX manual
> pages.

That it does. It's missing one major macro (.SS), and has a serious problem
with having to know the terminal type (I can't think of a single reason
it should), but it does a decent job.
-- 
Peter da Silva.  <peter@sugar.neosoft.com>.
 `-_-'   Oletko halannut suttasi t än ä än?
  'U`    
Tarjoilija, t äm ä ateria el ä ä viel ä.

Re: cawf (man page formatter)

#1573

Author: Vic Abell
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 15:31

22 lines
1707 bytes

In article <C004K0.E0K@NeoSoft.com> peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>In article <BzzIM1.MEM@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> abe@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Vic Abell) writes:
>> Cawf's development is finished.  It does an adequate job on most UNIX manual
>> pages.
>
>That it does. It's missing one major macro (.SS), and has a serious problem
>with having to know the terminal type (I can't think of a single reason
>it should), but it does a decent job.

Cawf's man.mac file does have a .SS macro, Peter.  Is there something wrong
with it?   Do you have a fix?

The terminal type requirement comes from AWF and probably Henry Spencer could
answer better than I why it is there.  My understanding is that he chose to
use the terminal type to locate an appropriate set of device-dependent
definitions -- mostly multi-stroke character definitions for things like \(bu,
but also some page and character size definitions.

If one set out to really duplicate nroff, I agree one wouldn't do it that way.
The saving grace for the AWF/cawf use of the terminal type for this purpose is
that the default definition file handles almost all cases, so one rarely needs
to define a special definition file.

Re: cawf (man page formatter)

#1578

Author: Peter da Silva
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 01:09

20 lines
1269 bytes

In article <C011tB.1GB@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> abe@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Vic Abell) writes:
> Cawf's man.mac file does have a .SS macro, Peter.  Is there something wrong
> with it?

I don't know. It complains about an unknown macro on man pages with .SS in
them. I could have an old version. Could you send me the latest?

I'm planning on integrating it with "textps", by the way, to make it a cheap
troff replacement too.

> The saving grace for the AWF/cawf use of the terminal type for this purpose is
> that the default definition file handles almost all cases, so one rarely needs
> to define a special definition file.

But it bails out if the special definition file isn't there!
-- 
Peter da Silva.  <peter@sugar.neosoft.com>.
 `-_-'   Oletko halannut suttasi t än ä än?
  'U`    
Tarjoilija, t äm ä ateria el ä ä viel ä.

Thread Navigation

This is a paginated view of messages in the thread with full content displayed inline.

Messages are displayed in chronological order, with the original post highlighted in green.

Use pagination controls to navigate through all messages in large threads.

Back to All Threads