u31b3hs@cip-s02.informatik.rwth-aachen.de (Michael Haardt) (04/19/91)
Hello world!
I finished working on my new version 1.1 of MROFF, a small troff clone. The
special feature of this textformatter is a preprocessor which allows to write
in Hindi, one of the many indian languages. It uses transliterations, which
means that text will be written with your favourite editor on a usual
terminal. MROFF runs on MINIX 1.5 and SunOS 4.1. There are printer drivers
for epson 8 and 24 pin dot matrix printers and screen drivers for Hercules
grafics cards and SunView. Note to Steve: What about the HP driver? I didn't
get it yet. MROFF uses the Hershey fonts, which means that there are many
fonts in many pointsizes. A preprocessor which does automatic hyphenation for
english documents is provided. A mail merger and a preprocessor for spell are
provided, too. There are -man and -ms like macro packages. Some people
thought that it is not able to use it for English or German last time. That's
false. I write the whole documentation for it using it. Writing this in Hindi
might be fine for Indians, but not for the rest of the world.
The new version 1.5.8 of Origami is finished, too. It has more Emacs-features
than 1.5 and less bugs. Origami is a folding editor similar to the TDS
editor. (Some PC users call it an outline editor.) It's a little bit
difficult to explain the principles of folding editors here, but there are
enough explanations in the documentation. Origami runs on MINIX 1.5 and SunOS
4.1. Its control language allows to write complex macros like fill-paragraph.
There are keybindings for Emacs and MultiTool. Origami may be even
interesting for Occam users, because it is able to edit TDS files! The whole
source code for MROFF is folded using Origami. I suggest using this editor if
hacking in MROFF. Even text processing gets easier with such an editor.
Origami also runs on TOS. The guy who ported it will post a note about this
in one of the TOS groups these days. If you detect any bugs in the TOS code,
please send mail to *me*. I head beta-testing and would like to see any
mails concerning it. I will forward a copy of TOS specific mails to him.
I am looking for beta-testers of both MROFF and Origami. I had no chance to
use them on 68K MINIX, but there should be no essential difficulties. The
source should be portable, there are no system dependent #ifdef's to divide
between SunOS and MINIX. (There are feature dependent #ifdef's, but most of
them use _POSIX_something.) If you fix bugs, please send me uuencoded contexts
diffs to mhaardt@ftp.thp.uni-koeln.de, not to the adress in the header.
You can get these beta-versions from the MINIX ftp archive in Cologne, Germany:
Server: ftp.thp.uni-koeln.de [134.95.64.1]
Path: minix/beta-test
Files: mroff.tar.Z, origami.tar.Z, misslib.tar.Z
Path: minix/lib/portable
Files: curses.tar.Z, needed for the mail merger
Path: minix/commands/simple-commands/lpd.tar.Z
All files are 13-bit compressed tape archives. misslib.tar.Z contains a few
local library extensions, like a putw/getw, an unreversible crypt function and
two /usr/include/local/ header files, which are used in almost all of my
programs. The curses library is an almost clean and debugged version of Ron
Cain's PC/n/curses port. lpd is a small line printer deamon. It is a
temporary solution for those with nothing else than PH lpr. You may get
problems with MROFF without a line printer deamon. A solution for single-user
machines without enough memory for additional things may be to copy output
directly to /dev/lp.
There is a problem with compiling Origami with PC MINIX 1.5. The 1.5 cem
shipped by PH does not work because there are too many extern's in the code.
The cem version from plains (from the 1.3 -> 1.5 upgrade kit) works without
problems. Both cem's have maximum stack space. Are there really two
versions? What are the differences that use so much stack space? We detected
another problem, too. The asld shipped by PH *does* handle static in modules
right, whereas the version from plains does not. This error is well known and
well flamed. It really seems as if AST worked on the compiler without talking
about it. Am I right? Should we use the plains cem and the PH shipped asld?
What's the matter with the 1.5 compiler(s?)?
You will also find spell dictionaries on this server. I will post MROFF and
Origami in June in comp.os.minix, after Beta-testing has ended. The complete
package is my personal solution for textprocessing at home since a year. It
won the race between Word, IBM Text 4 and Word Perfect on a few DOS machines,
which are running MINIX now :-) Of course, not most of them, which makes me
laughing each time a DOS user shouts his machine a $%&#~@... The small MINIX
group seems to be more happy :-)
This posting will appear in comp.os.minix, soc.culture.indian, comp.text and
comp.editors.
The beta-test phase will end in June. I will post both MROFF 1.1 and Origami
1.6 in comp.os.minix and leave notes in comp.text, comp.editors,
comp.sys.transputer, soc.culture.indian and alt.sources.
If you send mail to me, please use mhaardt@ftp.thp.uni-koeln.de instead of the
adress in the header. And think twice before asking things which are
described in the documentation. You will probably find mistakes (wrong
spelled or wrong grammar) in the documentation. Correcting such mistakes
would be nice (cdiffs!). The Origami documentation can be formatted with
nroff or MROFF, the MROFF documentation must be formatted with MROFF.
Namaskaar
Michael Haardt
PS:
- Please send mail to mhaardt@ftp.thp.uni-koeln.de.
- Andy: Please say something about the compiler version.
- Fred: What about mcalc and lpd?
- Steve: Did you sent the driver?
- Using Origami may be dangerous. You may get unsatisfied with your old editor.