🚀 go-pugleaf

On 4 Dec 90 21:14:19 GMT, ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) said:

ronald> rstevens@noao.edu (Rich Stevens) writes:
 
rstevens> Speaking of which, does anyone know the status of troff and
rstevens> man-pages for 4.4BSD ?  [ ... ] or else they were going to
rstevens> reformat all the man pages in TeX and use TeX for the man
rstevens> pages.

They could ship g++ and groff; after all they already use gcc as their
compiler.

ronald> NO!  PLEASE NO!  Even shipping "awf" the "awf"ully slow nroff
ronald> -m(s|an) replacement written in awk by Henry Spencer would be
ronald> better than that!

Well, I agree that teX is atrocious (even if there is now a fairly good
and updated C implementation from Pat Monardo). But TeXInfo is not that
horrible, and the makeinfo and info previewers are are not that horrible
either. I have often considered myself turning all the man pages over to
TeXInfo format.

Naturally this as always leaves the problem of getting TeX to print
decently (dvidoc does not quite get it right) on any low resolution
device. I may well look into this eventually; all we need is to modify
TeX so that it does all positioning in units that are a multiple of its
fundamental resolution, just like ditroff does already.
--
Piercarlo Grandi                   | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk