rclark@speclabbgp-usgs.gov (Roger N. Clark) (02/24/89)
Does HP or a third party sell the writer's workbench (for series 300, 500 and 800; we have all three)? It sure would be nice to have! Roger N. Clark ..!speclab!rclark
rjn@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Bob Niland) (02/27/89)
re: "Does HP or a third party sell the writer's workbench (for series 300, 500 and 800; we have all three)? It sure would be nice to have!" From: jv@mhres.UUCP (Johan Vromans) Date: Sat, 23 May 87 12:53:43 MDT Subject: Nroff/Troff for HP-UX with Laserjet (Summary) Organization: Multihouse NV, the Netherlands Path: hpfcmp!hpfcdc!hplabs!sri-unix!husc6!seismo!mcvax!mhres!jv Newsgroups: comp.sources.wanted,comp.sys.hp,comp.text A few weeks ago, I put the following question on the net: > Hewlett-Packard makes fine computers (HP9000) with good operating systems > (HP-UX) and even better laserprinters (HP-Laserjet). > > Is there anybody who can provide me with a version of nroff (or troff) > for HP9000 model 500 or 300, running HP-UX, which is capable driving the > Laserjet? Of course HP should provide them, but they don't. I have received lots of replies, which I will summarize here. eroff from ELAN. Contains troff, pic, grap, tbl, eqn exclusively for the HP Laserjet, using the B or F cartridge. It does a fine job except for one major thing. It knows how to download fonts (if you've got an LJ+), but only HP soft fonts. Lacking these, printing much of anything in a point size other than the default makes the LJ die on a complexity error (21). So, if you want to do more than a line or two of a strange point size, get the soft fonts. (thanks to: gargoyle!congdon) I bought recently a version of TROFF "eroff" from ELAN Computer Group that runs under XENIX with HP-Laser Jet, LaserJet+ and LaserJet II. It is not cheap $795 + shipping / handling, but now with the U.S. dollar below 2 guilders it is a bargain for you (I am being sarcastic). (thanks to: jplcwp!deutsch) "tplus" from Textware International is the best of the products I've seen, and the middle price of the three. Image Network - (somewhere in California) highest price, second best quality Elan Computers - (*somewhere else in California. I think the email address is amdahl!kgreer or amdahl!greer, but I'm not sure.) much lower price, quality unexciting but usable. (thanks to: ho95e!wcs) Elan offers excellent troff support for the Laserjet on HP-UX. (thanks to: hpda!hpisoa1!davel) A local company, Textware International, sells a port of the AT&T Documenter's Work Bench (DWB) including dvi drivers for the HP LaserJet and LaserJet+. We use and like the product. (thanks to: maynard!campbell) You can purchase the binaries on a tape for a price of 1300 usd by sending a telex or mail to our addresses mentioned below specifying the machine type (300/500) and by paying freight collect. The features of the product (laserjet-i) include: 1. Setup instructions 2. LP laser driver script skeleton for rs-232 with the following options: -om manual feed -ov vertical print -or raw (graphics) mode 3. Bold/underline filter (hp2686a-i) for producing bolding / underlining from standard nroff output. This is added in the driver script when one hasn't set the raw mode option mentioned, so users don't see it, they can type eg. command: nroff -mm infile | lp -dlaser 4. HP 8-bit character set filter. The filter is used to change the usascii 7-bit characters into national ones. It defaults to the scandinavian charset (quite naturally :-), where eg. usascii '[' is an uppercase umlaut-A. You can specify other conversions (eg. the dutch one about which I currently don't know anything :-) on command line or in an environment variable HP8FILTER. This is used here to create 7-bit finnish documents with command: nroff -mm infile | hp8filter | lp -dlaser which can be hidden from enduser by creating simple scripts: we have them on names 'finlaser' and 'uslaser', which are addendums to our product. If you're using the system in 8 bit mode using 8-bit vi or similar, this is not needed, but because the hp-nroff doesn't eat 8-bit chars on input, I doubt it... Petri Launiainen @ Intrinsic Oy (thanks to: sibelius!pl) Elan Computer Group sells a version of troff, which we use with our 9000/550+HP-UX+Laserjet. The system includes eqn, tbl, troff, pic and the newest version also has grap. The price for our system is close to $2000 now. They include some support for European characters. (thanks to: hafro!gunnar) In the mean time, someone asked the same question for IBM-PC. From the net I took the following reply: Elan Software makes an excelent WWB product [for IBM PCOA], including ditroff and some drivers. Don't have the paper address, but their net machine is ihnp4!chinet!steinmetz!elan. Super product and support! (thanks to: seismo!rutgers!sri-spam!mordor!styx!ptsfa! ihnp4!chinet!steinmetz!davidsen) Addresses: ELAN Computer Group 410 Cambridge Ave, Suite A Palo Alto, CA 94306 (415) 322-2450 E-mail: ..hplabs!elan!support Textware International P.O. Box 14 Harvard Square Cambridge, MA 02238 (617) UNI-TEXT {wjh12,cfib}!textware!brent Intrinsic Oy, Aleksis Kiven katu 11 C, 33720 Tampere, Finland Phone: (int) 358 31 132800, USENET: pl@intrin.FI, telex: 22004 tmpre sf boulder.UCAR.EDU!cdash sent me a nroff to laserjet filter. If you are interested, I'll mail it to you. I'll add my own filter too.
rclark@speclabbgp-usgs.gov (Roger N. Clark) (03/01/89)
From the responses I have seen so far, it is apparent that people aren't aware of WWB. The posting by Bob Niland was about nroff/troff (DWB, as Clarke Echols said). But WWB contains writing analysis programs. The two that are on the 500 (style and diction) are common BSD programs and really aren't very useful (as Clarke indicated). (The diction program can help a little or indicate extreme problems.) WWB includes programs to do things like: find split infinitives find repeated typings of words (like the the) checks punctuation and more. WWB has many additional features that may be more amusing than useful (like find sexist phrases, compare the style of one document with another--e.g. how close is your writing to shakespear?). But overall I think it is a useful package to have if it is not too expensive. Anyone know of (unsuported) public domain versions? Bob Niland's reposting of Johan Vromans is for typsetting programs only, not WWB. By the way, I have posted nroff driver tables for the laserjets and HPUX. I also have them on Sun (BSD) and VAX VMS/Eunice. The original work in decifering the table format was done by Bruce Townsend--I just added the laser specifics. It is very easy to adding a whole new printer, sort of like adding a terminal to the terminfo database. Send me email if you are new to the net and didn't get those postings. Roger N. Clark U.S. Geological Survey, MS 964 Box 25046 Federal Center Denver, CO 80225-0046 (303) 236-1332 FTS 776-1332 ..!speclab!rclark
jlo@elan.UUCP (Jeff Lo) (03/04/89)
I usually try to mail directly to people rather than flood the net with information about our product, but some of the information posted in the article I'm following up is is somewhat out of date and no longer correct. Hence the posting. In article <5570128@hpfcdc.HP.COM> you write: >re: "Does HP or a third party sell the writer's workbench (for series 300, > 500 and 800; we have all three)? It sure would be nice to have!" This is actually about Documenter's WorkBench (DWB). Writer's WorkBench is the collection of style, diction, etc. tools. I don't know that AT&T is still making WWB available or not. >From: jv@mhres.UUCP (Johan Vromans) >Date: Sat, 23 May 87 12:53:43 MDT >Subject: Nroff/Troff for HP-UX with Laserjet (Summary) >Organization: Multihouse NV, the Netherlands >Path: hpfcmp!hpfcdc!hplabs!sri-unix!husc6!seismo!mcvax!mhres!jv >> Is there anybody who can provide me with a version of nroff (or troff) >> for HP9000 model 500 or 300, running HP-UX, which is capable driving the >> Laserjet? Of course HP should provide them, but they don't. > >I have received lots of replies, which I will summarize here. > > eroff from ELAN. Contains troff, pic, grap, tbl, eqn > exclusively for the HP Laserjet, using the B or F cartridge. > It does a fine job except for one major thing. It knows how to > download fonts (if you've got an LJ+), but only HP soft fonts. > (thanks to: gargoyle!congdon) Eroff has included a PostScript driver for quite a while now. There is also an optional Imagen driver. Also, Eroff has for some time now supported downloaded fonts from sources other than HP. We have customers who use the Fontware program from SoftCraft to generate fonts that they use with eroff. Eroff is available for HP 300's, 500's and 800's. > I bought recently a version of TROFF "eroff" from ELAN Computer > Group that runs under XENIX with HP-Laser Jet, LaserJet+ and > LaserJet II. It is not cheap $795 + shipping / handling, but > now with the U.S. dollar below 2 guilders it is a bargain for > you (I am being sarcastic). > (thanks to: jplcwp!deutsch) Current prices for Eroff start at $695 depending on the machine. ... > Elan Computers - (*somewhere else in California. I think the > email address is amdahl!kgreer or amdahl!greer, but I'm not > sure.) much lower price, quality unexciting but usable. > (thanks to: ho95e!wcs) Ken Greer has not been at Amdahl for some time now, try using this: ..!{ames,hplabs,uunet}!elan!kg to get to Ken. The product has been much improved in the three or so years since Ken was working at Amdahl. > Elan offers excellent troff support for the Laserjet on HP-UX. > (thanks to: hpda!hpisoa1!davel) ... > Elan Computer Group sells a version of troff, which we use with > our 9000/550+HP-UX+Laserjet. The system includes eqn, tbl, > troff, pic and the newest version also has grap. The price for > our system is close to $2000 now. They include some support for > European characters. > (thanks to: hafro!gunnar) Out of the box, Eroff supports the Roman-8 character set used in the HP Soft Fonts. If you have your own fonts with other characters, all necessary tools and instructions are included to rebuild the necessary font description files for troff. There is also support for 8-bit keyboards in the way of a configurable filter which will convert 8-bit input into 7-bit plus special characters for troff. >In the mean time, someone asked the same question for IBM-PC. >From the net I took the following reply: > > Elan Software makes an excelent WWB product [for IBM PCOA], including DWB > ditroff and some drivers. Don't have the paper address, > but their net machine is ihnp4!chinet!steinmetz!elan. See address below. > Super product and support! > (thanks to: > seismo!rutgers!sri-spam!mordor!styx!ptsfa! > ihnp4!chinet!steinmetz!davidsen) > >Addresses: > ELAN Computer Group > 410 Cambridge Ave, Suite A > Palo Alto, CA 94306 > (415) 322-2450 > E-mail: ..hplabs!elan!support We are moving on March 15 1989. The new address will be: Elan Computer Group, Inc. 888 Villa Street, 3rd Floor Mountain View, CA 94041 (415) 964-2200 FAX: (415) 964-8588 Email: ..!{ames,hplabs,uunet}!elan!support Elan also has just announced an X11 based screen previewer for ditroff. Write or call for more details. -- Jeff Lo ..!{ames,hplabs,uunet}!elan!jlo Elan Computer Group, Inc. (415) 322-2450