crouch@axion.bt.co.uk (the man whose head expanded) (11/22/90)
Does anyone know if a tool exists to convert latex file into nroff format, and if so where it's available from? Regards, Chris ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chris Rouch crouch@axion.bt.co.uk RT3131, BTRL, Martlesham Heath, Ipswich, England. +44 473 646093 Only when we dream are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.
amoss@shum.UUCP (Amos Shapira) (11/23/90)
crouch@axion.bt.co.uk (the man whose head expanded) writes: >Does anyone know if a tool exists to convert latex file into nroff >format, and if so where it's available from? >Regards, >Chris There is Gnu texi2roff. Don't know what it is but it sounds like what you are looking for. Hope this helps, Amos Shapira amoss@batata.huji.ac.il
cpcahil@virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill) (11/26/90)
In article <1990Nov21.170131@axion.bt.co.uk> CRouch@axion.bt.co.uk writes: > >Does anyone know if a tool exists to convert latex file into nroff >format, and if so where it's available from? There is a tool called texi2roff which converts texinfo files to an nroff/troff source file. Works well (although I haven't seen the same document formatted by TeX so I can't say that they come out exactly the same). Copy of the Readme file follows: texi2roff - Texinfo to nroff/troff translator Notes for Release 1.0 Copyright 1988 Beverly A. Erlebacher (see copyright file) Raison d'etre: ------------- I wrote texi2roff to help out Rayan Zachariassen, the author of ZMailer. Rayan had prepared his documentation using Texinfo at the request of the GNU Project. After he sent ZMailer to his alpha testers, he got many complaints from people who did not have TeX installed and wanted documentation they could read or print with nroff/troff. In the expectation that there are other people in the same plight who would like to read documentation from the GNU project, I am posting texi2roff. Please Note: ----------- texi2roff translates Texinfo documents, *NOT* TeX documents. Not all GNU documentation uses Texinfo, although most of the recent material does. A Texinfo document can be distinguished from a TeX document by the preponderance of commands starting with '@'. TeX commands start with '\'. nroff vs. troff --------------- I tested this program almost exclusively with nroff, so I expect some bugs in the troff oriented commands. Please report bugs (and fixes!). Portability: ----------- I developed texi2roff on Sun 2's and 3's running Sun OS 3.n and 4.0 and tested it on a Vax running 4.2BSD, a MIPS running 4.3BSD and an HP-9000 running HP-UX. There is a -DBSD directive in the program which only controls which string header to #include and which of strchr() or index() is used. It is reported to work with Microport SVR2, Xenix System III and several other environments. It even compiles with Turbo C and runs under MSDOS (SoftQuad (sq.com) sells nroff/troff for MSDOS). For those using older C compilers, use -Dvoid=int. Thanks to Bob Webber (*not* the Bob Webber at Rutgers, this one is a metallurgist), Peter Lee, Wolf Paul, Eric Christensen and Bill Mitchell for testing this or an earlier version on a variety of machines, unix variants and compilers. In order to make the program more portable, I've added support for -me and -mm macros as well as the -ms macros it was developed with. Unfortunately, the -mm macros I have here are not the standard System V set. I would appreciate feedback on this - please report on any changes necessary. Design and Future Enhancements: ------------------------------ By isolating all explicit command strings in the table header files, I've made the program especially easy to modify and extend. Most customizations or refinements can (and should!) be made by twiddling the strings in the tables. When modifying texi2roff, please respect the design, and keep all explicit roff command strings in the table header files. Note that the user's selection of macro package does not affect any code in translate.c. Please strive to keep the program table-driven. I use a mixture of macros and raw commands which is causing some of the minor formatting problems. Ideally, the program should have its own macro package. More of the discarded commands could be implemented and some of the items in the 'bugs' section of the manual page addressed. Texinfo is a moving target. I have provided crude support for some features that will not appear until release 19 of Gnuemacs, since I dont have complete specs for them. Most new commands can just be added to the tables and the program will handle them. I feel robustness is very important so I have made every effort to detect, report and recover gracefully from errors in the input. As texi2roff is more than an order of magnitude faster than nroff, there is no need to sacrifice other desirable attributes for speed. ...uunet!utai!utcsri!erlebach erlebach@csri.toronto.edu Beverly Erlebacher Computer Systems Research Institute 10 King's College Road University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A4 -- Conor P. Cahill (703)430-9247 Virtual Technologies, Inc., uunet!virtech!cpcahil 46030 Manekin Plaza, Suite 160 Sterling, VA 22170