jim@baroque.Stanford.EDU (James Helman) (10/03/90)
Unfortunately, IRIX's base package leaves one without any way of formatting manual pages for add on software, like the software freely available on the net, e.g. all the X contrib stuff. To install or read legible versions of this free software's man pages, one has to buy SGI's Documenter's Workbench. It's only $300, which makes me wonder why SGI even bothered unbundling it. We would have ordered it if we had known we needed it for adding man pages, but we didn't. Fortunately for those too lazy (or too poor) to push through a PO to buy SGI's DWB, enter Henry Spencer, who wrote a package called awf (Amazingly Workable Formatter), which emulates a subset of nroff for man pages. Written entirely in awk(!!), it's the ideal package for those with more MIPS than $ to burn. I put awf out for ftp on fresnel.stanford.edu with a couple additions: 1) A script to run awf as nroff and act as a dummy tbl and neqn to dupe man(1) into working. 2) A makefile for use in /usr/catman/local to generate compressed formatted versions of local man pages. Unlike BSD systems, IRIX man(1) does not automatically store cat'able versions. You can pick it up by anonymous ftp from fresnel.stanford.edu. Look in pub/4DX/awf-sgi.tar.Z. The original is available from cs.toronto.edu. Note: awf is only a partial implementation of -ms and -man. It doesn't do tbl or eqn'ing. GNU's groff should do a more complete job. Does anyone have groff running under IRIX? Jim Helman Department of Applied Physics Durand 012 Stanford University FAX: (415) 725-3377 (jim@KAOS.stanford.edu) Work: (415) 723-9127