bill@carpet.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) (09/25/88)
Early last week I posted an article asking if anyone had used the V/AT
troff to successfully format manual pages. John Sully replied that he
had but had not encountered the difficulties I did with JetRoff. Rick
Richardson followed up that the symptoms I described were not likely
to be in JetRoff and suggested that Microport could probably make some
money compiling DWB 2.0 for V/AT.
I have since purchased another troff and it confirms Rick's suggestion
that the problems I had were troff related, JetRoff is innocent. I
found that running the very same source through several different troff's
produced the same result. The only troff that failed to perform as it
should was Microport V/AT. Each of the others behaved correctly with a
rather wide variety of pre-processors and post-processors.
I want to make it clear that this is not a flame. As I pointed out in
an earlier article, I got my money's worth out of nroff and it certainly
did what I wanted. It's my intent to save someone some bucks if they
really want troff. I suggest avoiding the Microport offering in that
case. If there's a leter version than 1.3 (that's what I have on three
diskettes) then perhaps Microport could confirm its functionality with
JetRoff and mark me as out-of-date.
--
Bill Kennedy Internet: bill@ssbn.WLK.COM
Usenet: { killer | att | rutgers | uunet!bigtex }!ssbn!bill