bcking@faust.UUCP (01/03/86)
The problem is not getting WordPerfect to read ascii files: it does that just fine. Simply exchanging output is not what I want to do. I want to exchange intermediate files with formatting information but not actually formatted. Margin settings, footnote locations, page text, footnote text, page length, font info etc should be passed between wp and troff, via some intermediate form like Navy DIF (or, heaven forbid, IBM's DCA). The real problem is that we have engineers (Unix-heads) and managers (with secretaries using wordprocessors) and documentation people (using ABDick machines for now) contributing to the same document. The objective is to be able to modify documents using either wp or nroff or both, and then use either one to do the final formatting and output. So what we need, we think, is some way to get n/troff and wp to speak the same intermediate language. WordPerfect does this somewhat now, and better and more as it matures. n/troff is another story: it isn't a product, so it doesn't mature, it just gets older. ==Chris