clewis@ecicrl.UUCP (Chris Lewis) (12/04/90)
A couple of the people trying to use psroff have encountered the fact that DEC changed the width table formats for Ultrix 4 CAT troff without seeming to ship any width table files in the new format or documentation on it whatsoever. Ultrix 4 CAT Troff can't even read the width tables it came with.... And, of course, since Ultrix troff is unsupported software, the support center is unwilling to help. If it wasn't supported, why the bleep did they change it?!!!! Twits-of-the-week. Sigh... It seems to want some sort of ASCII files rather than the more common binary. I seem to remember someone posting at least 6 months ago a patch to some piece of software to cope with the "new width table format for troff on the xxx OS" (where I can't remember xxx...) which was ASCII.... Which given my defective memory, might be what we're looking for. As an idiot myself, I neglected to save it. If anyone can help, either on Ultrix 4 width tables specifically, or that old posting, please e-mail me (perhaps psroff-request@eci386 would be the better address than below). You'll make many people very happy. [BTW: for Ultrix 4 users, all is not lost. You can run Psroff 2.0 as-is by removing the ".fp"'s from "cmn.pre" temporarily. Then troff/psroff will use the width tables that have been compiled into troff. Unfortunately, the widths are somewhat (but not grossly off), and you can't do any ".fp"'s to use fonts other than R, I, B and S, but it's still useable. I was unable to get through to one of the people reporting this problem.] Please don't post to comp.unix.ultrix alone - my machine isn't subscribed to it. comp.text is better. Thank you very much. -- Chris Lewis, Phone: (613) 832-0541 UUCP: uunet!utai!lsuc!ecicrl!clewis Moderator of the Ferret Mailing List (ferret-request@eci386) Psroff mailing list (psroff-request@eci386)