ian@sq.UUCP (02/07/87)
Some contributors to the discussions in this newsgroup seem to convey the impression that troff is dying of old age. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, the rumors of troff's death are greatly exaggerated. Troff is alive and well and living in the UNIX environment. Several sites are doing significant troff development. Brian Kernighan at Bell Labs Research continues to come up with pre-processors, such as ``chem'', a program to insert chemical drawings with elements such as benzene rings into place in a text, just as eqn puts equations into place in a text. Berkeley has added several extensions to troff. Several other universities are developing or modifying troff. A dozen or so companies offer ditroff drivers for popular laser printers and typesetters (Image Network sells one for the LN03). Troff has even been ported to MS-DOS by Elan Computer Group. And then there is SoftQuad. SoftQuad set out to make production quality typesetting software for UNIX. ``Production quality typesetting'' in this regard means the type of type (so to speak) that would be acceptable in an old-style craft printing house. There is quite literally nothing available that is up to these typographer's standards. Not Scribe. Not TeX. Not AT&T's ditroff. Not Mac-Anything. Not PageMaker. All these are fine products in their own field, have been used to typeset many papers and theses and a small mountain of books. But none of them will stand up in a job printing shop with high standards and commercial pressures. The founders of SoftQuad considered several packages as possible starting points (including Scribe, TeX, and ditroff), and settled (in 1984) on ditroff. They set out to make it usable in commercial typography. Two of the most important problems were the lack of a hyphenation dictionary facility and the lack of kerning. Avi Naiman (who used to work with us) mentioned a paper we did at USENIX in January, 1985 describing some of the work. By that time the company had in place a ditroff with proper hyphenation and with contour kerning. They had also totally rewritten the ditroff intermediate language to be easier to pass through UNIX software tools like awk. In the ditroff intermediate language, for example, the input string ``hello'' might appear as ``ch 19e17l10l10on423 0'' while in ours it appears as ``hello''. Both ditroff and sqtroff intermediate languages contain only ascii characters (unlike SCRIBE and DVI files which contain ``unprintable'' characters: h\220G\034ello). Production publishing shops need to be able to extract (from a trial formatting run) arbitrary information beyond what most formatters provide. Having the intermediate language in a readable form (that admittedly owes some of its form to PostScript) allows simple shell scripts with programs like grep or awk to process the intermediate file to extract this information. We also have made life easier for those who must ``meddle in the affairs of troff''. We've added a comprehensive trace facility that lets you see what a troff macro really does. We allow names longer than two characters, so you no longer need to write macros with names that look like bird droppings. And we've cleaned up the code - a lot. For more technical details on what we've done, see the USENIX paper (Dallas, January 1985, page 165) or contact us. Note that the address shown in that paper has changed. The remainder of this notice deals with licensing and commercial issues; if you are an anti-commercial techie, this may hurt your ears; so reach for your interrupt key now! Despite the urgings of our marketing people, we try very hard not to ship a product until it is ready. Thus we did not ship any formal released products until June, 1986, although a few friends and associates received our software before that. Since then, a number of books has been produced at sites using our software, and many papers and theses typeset (if you were at the UniForum trade show, you might have seen the SCO Third Party Software catalog - it was typeset with SoftQuad troff). Despite the enhancements to troff and the changes to the intermediate language, most old troff files will work with our product. As was pointed out, our LN03 driver has not been shipped yet. Admittedly our sales staff did accept a purchase order for it several months ago (the customer, GEAC, was told before ordering that no specific delivery date had been set for the LN03). We are running the LN03 software in-house, but we aren't yet happy with the fonts, so we can't ship it as production software. When we do ship a preliminary version of something, we try to so identify it. Our customers have a right to expect prompt shipment of orders that we accept, but because we currently ship only binary products, customers also have a right to expect it to work ``out of the box''. When it is ready, we will ship it. We are a source licensee of AT&T's Documentor's WorkBench product. But we do not have a monopoly on distribution of DWB. If your printing needs don't include top-quality typography, and want to write your own drivers and support them and put big fixes into troff yourself, you should certainly be able to order the unsupported DWB Release 1 or 2 source from AT&T. If you want a quality typesetting product that is derived from DWB and is supported, we hope you will order from us. Ian Darwin, Director of R&D, SoftQuad, Inc. 720 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario Canada M5S 2T9 +1 416 963-8337 Opinions expressed herein *are* those of SoftQuad, Inc., and the author. The product names used herein are trademarks of their respective manufacturers and/or vendors.