🚀 go-pugleaf

Poster wants to know if/why not nroff can be
enhanced for variable width dot matrix printers.

We supply the world with nroff; that is, all nroffs
I know of come from the original Bell Labs version
(except anything FSF supplies with groff).
We haven't changed nroff in recent memory; the code has
changed little since the 1970's.  The current DWB 3.1
and 3.2 packages have a troff postprocessor called dnroff
that permit you to use troff as a fixed-width printer
formatter. Variable-width nroff is not contemplated.

At some point we will drop nroff completely; instead,
you would use the pipeline
	... troff -Tnroff | dnroff | lp ...

It is simply not worth maintaining and testing a program
(nroff) that only works with 1970 technology devices.
troff does both jobs. I will add there is a misperception
that nroff is faster than troff-- it is not.