troff & nroff

[Rick Richardson]

In article <1990Jul26.213709.28799 at eci386.uucp> clewis at eci386.UUCP (Chris Lewis) writes:

>Grap and pic are coming too someday....

I believe there was a compile-time option to DWB 1.0's pic that
told it to spit periods out in order to draw lines.  These would
pass thru old-troff and allow pic to work.  I know this from
making DWB 1.0 pic work at a site full of Sun's and old troff.
I remember, though, that it spewed mass quantities of data into
troff which blew troff's input buffer, and pic had to be modified
(we had source) to work around this problem.  It also caused the
output of troff, passed thru transcript (CAT->PS conversion, ala
psroff) to be absolutely enormous.  It worked, but to say I was I
little sick to my stomach about the whole configuration would be
an understatement.

I think for laughs I tried running an earlier cat2dit filter
on the pic -> CAT troff output and then running it thru jetroff.
The output was still huge, because the damage had already been
done by pic dropping dots to construct lines.  This is one of
the things (font limits and trouble with the MM macros being
another) that convinced me that it would be bad karma to help
the efforts to extend the life of CAT troff any further.

Of course, hobbling around on crutches is better than not walking
at all, and Chris put together as comfortable a pair of crutches
as can be had.  Chrome fender dents, too!

I'm not sure how you plan to do pic within the psroff environment,
but thats my two cent horror story.  Grap, of course, is a
preprocessor to pic, so if pic works, so will grap.

-Rick

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