ptseg@cal-unix (11/08/85)
We are running 4.1 UNIX on a VAX 11/750; much of our work involves cranking out large documents and printouts of databases. Both these tasks involve a lot of nroffing, which seems to hog all the time on our computer. After examining a lot of the nroff-able docs on our system, I found that there are at most five nroff commands that are used(i.e. .bp, .nf, .ce) in 99.9% of the documents. Does anyone out there have a stripped-down version of nroff that only implements the really rudimentary parts of the program? If so, I would greatly appreciate any info about it. I figure a small nroff in place of the now-monstrous one would greatly ease the burden on our poor little computer, and give me more time to do important things, like play rogue. By the way, we have a 4.1 src license. Peter Thaggard, cal-uni!ptseg
wcs@ho95e.UUCP (Bill.Stewart.4K435.x0705) (11/13/85)
In article <673@cal-unix> ptseg@cal-uni.UUCP (Peter Thaggard) writes: > >We are running 4.1 UNIX on a VAX 11/750; ..... >.... I found that there are at most five nroff commands that are used(i.e. >.bp, .nf, .ce) in 99.9% of the documents. Does anyone out there have a >stripped-down version of nroff that only implements the.... AT&T sells (I think as part of the Documenter's Workbench?) a product called "sroff". It's about 10 times as fast as nroff; if you include the mm macro package it slows down to 3 times as fast. The mm stuff is compatible; the macro facility is more limited, and it doesn't handle eqn or troff. But it's fast, and even runs on MS-DOS PCs. As an alternative, consider getting a cheap 68000-based UNIX machine, and having it just do nroff. You can get them for as low as about $4000 and they can be almost as fast as a 750 (i.e. still slow, but you don't care.) We have an internal product which is a 68000 board with 750K memory and a small PROM monitor that knows how to download n/troff and process jobs. It's a single-process machine, but there's almost no overhead, so it's only limited by communications bandwidth, and it does a good job of offloading the main CPU. Avalon builds a similar board that plugs into a UNIBUS; it costs more but does more. -- ## Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcs