Formatting man pages without nroff

[James Helman]

Unfortunately, IRIX's base package leaves one without any way of
formatting manual pages for add on software, like the software freely
available on the net, e.g. all the X contrib stuff.  To install or
read legible versions of this free software's man pages, one has to
buy SGI's Documenter's Workbench.  It's only $300, which makes me
wonder why SGI even bothered unbundling it.  We would have ordered it
if we had known we needed it for adding man pages, but we didn't.

Fortunately for those too lazy (or too poor) to push through a PO to
buy SGI's DWB, enter Henry Spencer, who wrote a package called awf
(Amazingly Workable Formatter), which emulates a subset of nroff for
man pages.  Written entirely in awk(!!), it's the ideal package for
those with more MIPS than $ to burn.

I put awf out for ftp on fresnel.stanford.edu with a couple additions:

	1) A script to run awf as nroff and act as a dummy tbl and
	neqn to dupe man(1) into working.

	2) A makefile for use in /usr/catman/local to generate
	compressed formatted versions of local man pages.  Unlike
	BSD systems, IRIX man(1) does not automatically store cat'able
	versions.

You can pick it up by anonymous ftp from fresnel.stanford.edu.  Look
in pub/4DX/awf-sgi.tar.Z.  The original is available from
cs.toronto.edu.

Note: awf is only a partial implementation of -ms and -man.  It
doesn't do tbl or eqn'ing.  GNU's groff should do a more complete job.
Does anyone have groff running under IRIX?

Jim Helman
Department of Applied Physics			Durand 012
Stanford University				FAX: (415) 725-3377
(jim at KAOS.stanford.edu) 			Work: (415) 723-9127