solomon@gjetost.cs.wisc.edu (Marvin Solomon) (07/12/89)
By popular demand, I've released my troff previewer program to the world. A blurb about it appears below. It has been fairly widely used for nearly a year, so it should be reasonably stable. Nonetheless (for any lawyers reading this), it is strictly "use at your own risk". If you have any problems or suggestions for improvement, let me know, but please read the README and man page carefully first. The source is available for anonymous ftp from expo.lcs.mit.edu as contrib/xproof.tar.Z (83693 bytes, BSD Unix sum: 09999 82). It will also be available soon in comp.source.x. An extract from the README follows: XPROOF -- An X Windows Previewer for Typesetter-Independent Troff Version for X11 Release 3, February 1989 Marvin Solomon Computer Sciences Department University of Wisconsin, Madison WI solomon@cs.wisc.edu or uwvax!solomon This directory contains a program allows you to preview the output of "Typesetter-Independent Troff" (also called "Device-Independent Troff" or "ditroff") on a workstation running the X Window system. I previously wrote a similar program that worked under version 10 of X Windows, but the current program was written "from scratch" for X version 11, using the X Toolkit Intrinsics and Athena Widgets. The spline routines in draw.c were lifted from a device driver included in the ditroff package. Otherwise, everything is original. This software is distributed under the same conditions as the X Windows package itself, namely, that you don't blame me for bugs in it and that you don't erase my name from it and sell it as your own. I would also appreciate hearing about your experiences with it, especially bug fixes and enhancements. I cannot promise to fix anything, but you tell me about bugs or deficiencies, I might be able to help. The program has not yet seen widespread distribution, so it might still have a few bugs. I've compiled and run it successfully on a variety of client hosts, including VAX Unix (both Ultrix 3.0 and 4.3 BSD), Sun 3 and Sun 4 (SunOS 4.0), HP Bobcats, IBM RT/PC's (AOS), and DECstation 3100 (MIPS Ultrix). It seems to work ok with color, black and white, and gray-scale servers, including the VAX qvss and qdss displays (however, see comments in the README file about the latter). It should work with little or no change on other flavors of Berkeley Unix. I have no idea about System V. -- Marvin Solomon Computer Sciences Department University of Wisconsin, Madison WI solomon@cs.wisc.edu, uwvax!solomon