info-mac@uw-beaver (12/15/84)
From: Norman Meyrowitz <nkm%brown.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> MacWrite to SCRIPT and TROFF translator. As posted last week, Brown's Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) has developed a C program that does MacWrite to TROFF or MacWrite to SCRIPT translation depending on the conditional compilation flag. The program is fairly robust, implementing multiple type faces and sizes, all the appropriate tabbing, appropriate line leading, etc., up to the capabilities of SCRIPT and TROFF. It does NOT implement headers and footers, primarily because SCRIPT and TROFF only support very limited versions thereof without a lot of hacking, and because the information in MacWrite files regarding page numbers and dates is kept in QuickDraw page coordinates rather than the data stream, making computing the place of the page numbers in a non-WYSIWYG output format trickier than we cared to do for the first version. The second caveat is that the system was designed not to translate for end user use, but only for use in a print server. Thus, the output is not as clean as one might want it if it were to be used by humans (e.g. each paragraphs are split into lines with continuation characters at the end; each time a ruler is found, its entire information is translated and output, rather than only outputting the differences from the last ruler). But it works just fine for printing, with the full Mac special character set implemented for a Xerox 9700 printer in SCRIPT, and any standard TROFF output device (Imagen, Varian). The translator currently works on both SUNs and Vaxes under 4.2 UNIX, so there does not seem to be any byte-ordering problems. How do I get the translator, you ask? We do not proscribe to the current software policies of submitting prerelease versions of things to the entire free world as soon a name has been picked for the product. We DO, however, have every intention of distributing the translator to the net as soon as it has remained somewhat stable in-house here. That has begun to happen (it has been in rather heavy Beta-usage for about two weeks now), and we expect that it will be ready to distribute to the world around Christmas-time. We also hope to have documentation at that time, so that people can understand exactly what the program does and doesn't do. So to get a copy of the program, send a request to nkm%brown.csnet@csnet-relay I have a log of all previous requests, and will continue to update that log. Most likely we will post the source to the net, but sending a request will enable us to determine how many people really want this and help us determine how many more extensions we should make. I hope that this doesn't sound too stringent or grumbly -- it's just that after being the victims of 93% tested software over the last year, our group is sensitive about inflicting that pain on others... Please feel free to comment or ask questions... Norm Meyrowitz Scholar's Workstation Group Manager Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) Brown University Box 1946 Providence, RI 02912 (401) 863-2943 nkm%brown.csnet@csnet-relay [As for the printer server, there is a Mac front-end and a SUN receiver that accepts documents over a modified XMODEM connection, but this part is still somewhat specific to our networking configuration, so we need to do some more work before releasing this]