🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Dec1.015152.25128@agate.berkeley.edu> ilan343@violet.berkeley.edu (Geraldo Veiga) writes:
|In article <977@iiasa.UUCP> wnp%iiasa@relay.eu.net (Wolf PAUL ) writes:
|>In article <1990Nov29.154821.1709@cbnewsl.att.com> npn@cbnewsl.att.com (nils-peter.nelson) writes:
|>)A poster asked the origins of the troff in System V
|>)release 4. It's an ancient Berkeley version; in fact,
|>)I think Bill Joy ported it himself. It's in the BSD
|>)compatibility directory. Works great if you have an
|>)APS phototypesetter.

|>Actually, it probably expects a C/A/T.

|>But don't despair: That is exactly what PSROFF, recently posted

|If you hope for a "standard" troff, there's every reason to despair.
|DWB 2.0 didn't make it as a standard because all BSD machines had the
|old troff built-in.  Now even System V systems will have it too.
|Well, at least the problem of maintaining and printing manual pages is
|solved, and PSROFF adds support to everyday printers. 

Well, actually, you could consider CAT troff to be the standard troff,
and DWB 2 & 3 to be minor aberrations...  Which is most unfortunate.
Most versions of UNIX that come with any sort of text processing stuff,
such as nroff, also come with CAT troff unless somebody noticed that
there was no way to use or test it with "modern" popular printers (eg:
Postscript or Laserjets) and left it out.  It is fortunate that many
vendors didn't notice that (even on some AT&T releases), because Psroff
(and a few others) came along and you could actually use it.  You can
even drive a DMD's xproof on-screen previewer with psroff using
otroff on a 3b2.

T'would be nice if AT&T released troff into PD (or redistributable
copyrighted) then those people who's vendors did notice and dropped
it could get a troff.  Without paying an arm and a leg, or simply
being unable to get ANYTHING at all.

CAT troff with psroff is production quality output, though, of course,
true ditroff is better because of some of the additional features.
The most important perhaps being the extensible character set.  I
can emulate in psroff most of the important unique-to-ditroff facilities,
but many of them are still a bit buggy.
-- 
Chris Lewis, Phone: (613) 832-0541
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