steve@vorga.umiacs.umd.edu (Steve D. Miller) (07/19/89)
I have (finally) gotten troff working on the DECstation 3100. I was unable to get the new (ASCII) format font width tables from anyone at DEC, so I decided to port the 4.3BSD troff and to punt the Ultrix troff. Easier said than done. Warning: description of gross code follows. Don't read this if you've eaten in the last hour or so... The 4.3BSD troff (and many other troffs, including the Berkeley-style ditroff I've seen) does something almost criminally gross. First, it declares about 6K worth of variables together, assuming that they will be placed together by the compiler. There's a total of 71 variables declared in this section. Then, when it hits a .ev directive, it changes environments by: 1) Take the address of the first variable declared in the list. 2) Multiply the current environment number (0, 1, or 2) by 6144, and lseek() out that far in some file in /tmp. 3) Write 6K from memory (starting at the address from (1) above) into the temp file. 4) Do another lseek() and read another 6K in from somewhere else in the file. Although gross, this works fine if your compiler allocates variables in declaration order. However, the DECstation C compiler does not do this. Can you say, "trash lots of random variables?" I knew you could... Also, once the 4.3BSD troff is working, you need font width tables in a format you can use. Any font width table produced in the normal way (i.e., 'cc -o ftR ftR.c'; TranScript does this, by the way) will not be in the proper format, as the binary produced will be in COFF format. You will need to run a converter across your COFF-style tables to turn them into a.out files, which the BSD troff will then be able to read. I have fixes for the 4.3BSD troff to clean up the environment handling to the point that it works. I also have a COFF->a.out converter that does what's needed in this situation. They're available for anonymous FTP from fnord.umiacs.umd.edu (128.8.120.3), as pub/trofffix.shar and pub/psfixfont.c. If you want them and can't FTP them, let me know, and I'll try to find time to send them to you. Please grab these only during the off hours; I still read my mail on fnord, and it's only a Sun-3/60... Also note that the 4.3BSD nroff won't work on DECstations, as DEC not only changed the terminal description tables, they actually shipped the new-style tables. With all these changes applied, we can actually troff to our Imagens and our PostScript printers from our DECstations. Whoopee. If you get these fixes, please let me know; I'm curious as to how many people still use troff, and how many really need this to work. Are we really that unusual? -Steve Spoken: Steve Miller Domain: steve@mimsy.umd.edu UUCP: uunet!mimsy!steve Phone: +1-301-454-1808 USPS: UMIACS, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
abe@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Vic Abell) (07/19/89)
In article <18615@mimsy.UUCP> steve@umiacs.umd.edu (Steve D. Miller) writes: > Also, once the 4.3BSD troff is working, you need font width tables in a >format you can use. There are at least two other fixes: 1) convert the troff code to read COFF format files directly (I did this once and it's not too hard); or 2) use the troff in DWB 2.0 where the font tables are no longer required in C compiler output format, but are simple text files.
rusty@garnet.berkeley.edu (07/19/89)
In article <18615@mimsy.UUCP> steve@vorga.umiacs.umd.edu (Steve D. Miller) writes:
Path: ucbvax!agate!bionet!ames!haven!mimsy!vorga.umiacs.umd.edu!steve
From: steve@vorga.umiacs.umd.edu (Steve D. Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix
Subject: Troff (finally) working on DECstations
Date: 18 Jul 89 17:30:24 GMT
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Reply-To: steve@umiacs.umd.edu (Steve D. Miller)
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Organization: UMIACS, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
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If you get these fixes, please let me know; I'm curious as to
how many people still use troff, and how many really need this to
work. Are we really that unusual?
As a diehard tex hacker all I can say is "let's hope so".
--
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rusty c. wright
rusty@violet.berkeley.edu ucbvax!violet!rustysteve@vorga.umiacs.umd.edu (Steve D. Miller) (07/19/89)
Sure, you can hack troff to read COFF or ASCII format tables, if that's what you'd prefer. For my purposes, I'd rather work with the a.out format tables; some of the software I have to deal with spits out a.out-format files without doing any compilation, and it just seems more backward- compatible to me. No big deal either way. Hacking troff to read a.out, COFF, and ASCII formats would also not be too hard (assuming that you know what the ASCII format looks like...) By the way, what do the DWB 2.0 font width tables look like? I'd guess that's the format that the DEC-distributed troff uses. -Steve Spoken: Steve Miller Domain: steve@mimsy.umd.edu UUCP: uunet!mimsy!steve Phone: +1-301-454-1808 USPS: UMIACS, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
jlo@elan.elan.com (Jeff Lo) (07/20/89)
In article <2742@mace.cc.purdue.edu> abe@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Vic Abell) writes: >There are at least two other fixes: 1) convert the troff code to read COFF >format files directly (I did this once and it's not too hard); or 2) use the >troff in DWB 2.0 where the font tables are no longer required in C compiler >output format, but are simple text files. Well, DWB 2.0 still uses binary format width tables, but they are not in a.out format. DWB comes with a table compiler called makedev, which reads the ASCII format width table source and converts it into the required binary format. Also to use the DWB 2.0 troff, you have to get DWB 2.0, which is unbundled from un*x. You can either get it from AT&T in source form (maybe 3B2 binaries too), or from a third party vendor. If you're interested in a supported third party troff, call or send me mail. -- Jeff Lo, Elan Computer Group, Inc. jlo@elan.com, ..!{ames,uunet}!elan!jlo 888 Villa Street, Third Floor, Mountain View, CA 94041, 415-964-2200
abe@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Vic Abell) (07/20/89)
In article <578@elan.elan.com> jlo@elan.elan.com (Jeff Lo) writes: >>In article <2742@mace.cc.purdue.edu> abe@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Vic Abell) writes: >Well, DWB 2.0 still uses binary format width tables, but they are not >in a.out format. DWB comes with a table compiler called makedev Jeff is correct. it is the dwb 2.0 nroff that no longer needs to have its terminal driver tables in a.out format. They are now ASCII files and no longer need to be compiled to be acceptable to nroff. It was my mistake in confusing the question about font tables of troff with the terminal driver tables of nroff in the original query.