jbwaters@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (J. Brian Waters) (07/03/90)
I have been collecting a number of programs off the net that come with
documentation in troff/nroff format. I have decided that it would be worthwhile
to get these programs rather then trying to read them in that format. What
would be the best source to get these? I would want troff to be able to print
to a HP LaserJet III. Since I have SCO Unix I looked at a price list I had
and could only find these programs for Xenix... I assume these would work?
Do they support the LJ III? I have requested information from SCO but have yet
to see any of it arive.
--
Brian Waters <backbone>!{iuvax|pur-ee}!bsu-cs!jbwatershb@vpnet.chi.il.us (hank barta) (07/11/90)
> I have been collecting a number of programs off the net that come with > documentation in troff/nroff format. I have decided that it would be > worthwhile > to get these programs rather then trying to read them in that format. What > would be the best source to get these? I would want troff to be able to print > to a HP LaserJet III. Since I have SCO Unix I looked at a price list I had > and could only find these programs for Xenix... I assume these would work? > Do they support the LJ III? I have requested information from SCO but have > yet > to see any of it arive. I am running the Xenix text processing system under SCO Unix. To the best of my knowledge, it would not be capable of taking advantage of an LJ III. I use it for 'light' text processing output to a Silver Reed 400 (Diablo compatible) daisy wheel printer, which seems to be adequately supported. It also formats man pages, although unless one modifies the man macro package, it identifies them as Xenix man pages. The executables are 8086 binaries (nroff and troff anyway) so I would expect that they might have problems with memory intensive jobs. (I once tried to process the umoria manual and got a fatal 'out of memory' error after several pages.) For my needs (and the price) Xenix text processing is adequate. I would be particularly interested in hearing about what is avialable (PD in particular) that supports the LJ II and III printers. hank White Oak Software Inc. Henry Barta 0 South 258 Park (708) 462-6909 (voice) Winfield, IL 60190 ...!vpnet.chi.il.us!pswin!barta Predictable systems by design. hb@vpnet.chi.il.us
rick@pcrat.uucp (Rick Richardson) (07/13/90)
In article <11381@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> jbwaters@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (J. Brian Waters) writes: >would be the best source to get these? I would want troff to be able to print >to a HP LaserJet III. Since I have SCO Unix I looked at a price list I had >and could only find these programs for Xenix... I assume these would work? Since nobody else responded, here are some options. On SVR3.2, you can mix and match your vendors: - Get INTERACTIVE Text Processing Workbench (stock AT&T DWB 2.x) and add our own JetRoff LJ Postprocessor. Last I checked, ISC was selling DWB for $195 (1-2 user), and we sell JetRoff for $69 or $119, depending on whether you are a commercial user. The latest release of JetRoff has a previewer for EGA/VGA displays that can preview any LJ PCL Level 4, not just troff. I expect an X-windows version will be available in the future. (213) 453-8649 for ISC, (201) 389-8963 for PC Research. - Get Urban Applied Science Leverage, which includes stock AT&T Documenter's Workbench (DWB) 2.x and a slightly older JetRoff Postprocessor for $175. (201) 242-7230. - Get SCO Eroff for $895. (408) 425-7222. I've heard that Eroff's support for LJ's isn't great, and you might want to add JetRoff. On the plus side, Eroff does play with 3rd party device postprocessors. I've heard mixed reviews of their X windows previewer. Seems to be a love/hate thing, no in between. They say that Eroff has many of the stock AT&T DWB bugs fixed. In practice, you are unlikely to find them unless you are exploring the limits of troff. - Get Textware's system. Sorry, I can't find any advertising for them anymore. I think they are in Cambridge, MA. - Get Image Network's xroff. Sorry, I don't have a price. (415) 967-0542. I have reports that it may be difficult or impossible to use alternate device postprocessors with xroff. They have an X-windows previewer. - Get SoftQuad's sqtroff system. Sorry, I can't find any advertising for them. I think they are in Toronto, Canada. They have extended the troff input language considerably (which is welcome). However, they have changed the postprocessor intermediate language (which is not welcome). They claim that they have a filter which will allow use with postprocessors expecting the classic input. I can't be sure. If someone can fill me in on the details I'm missing, I'd appreciate it. There's no way to tell you which is best without knowing what the criteria are. I'd say UAS has got everybody beat if price is the most important consideration. Eroff seems to be a good choice for bug fixes and compatibility, and the security of a name brand behind it (whatever that's good for). -Rick -- Rick Richardson | Looking for FAX software for UNIX/386 ??? Ask About: |Mention PC Research,Inc.| FaxiX - UNIX Facsimile System (tm) |FAX# for uunet!pcrat!rick| FaxJet - HP LJ PCL to FAX (Send WP,Word,Pagemaker...)|Sample (201) 389-8963 | JetRoff - troff postprocessor for HP LaserJet and FAX|Output
davidsen@sixhub.UUCP (Wm E. Davidsen Jr) (07/15/90)
We run Elan at work, and have a site license for several types of
machines. We are a serious site for ?roff, if having two VAXen and three
Suns as dedicated roff servers counts.
Elan makes a good product and they back it 100%. They are absolutely
great as vendors, they have helped us numerous times even when the
problem was in the way we were using the product instead of a bug, and I
have good feelings for them completely.
They are not cheap, and Xenix users don't (or sisn't) get the man
pages when the ordered Elan from SCO.
--
bill davidsen - davidsen@sixhub.uucp (uunet!crdgw1!sixhub!davidsen)
sysop *IX BBS and Public Access UNIX
moderator of comp.binaries.ibm.pc and 80386 mailing list
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -memwarren@mips2.cr.bull.com (Mark Warren) (07/18/90)
In article <1990Jul13.152632.5779@pcrat.uucp> rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson) writes: >In article <11381@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> jbwaters@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (J. Brian Waters) writes: > >>would be the best source to get these? I would want troff to be able to print >>to a HP LaserJet III. Since I have SCO Unix I looked at a price list I had > >Since nobody else responded, here are some options. On SVR3.2, you >can mix and match your vendors: > I thought I did respond, but maybe I forgot. Anyway, this is an unsolicited plug for PC Research's JetRoff product. I have been using it intensively here with for manual pages and documents, including pic stuff, and I have yet to find a glitch. I have no connection to PC Research, other than being a satisfied customer. (N.B. - I am running their product on a Mips machine, not a PC, so I can't testify to the quality of SCO or Interactive's DWB - I haven't tried them). -- == Mark Warren Bull HN Information Systems Inc. == == (508) 294-3171 (FAX 671-3020) 300 Concord Road MS820A == == mwarren@granite.cr.bull.com Billerica, MA 01821 ==
chip@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Chip Rosenthal) (07/19/90)
A couple of weeks back I promised the comp.unix.xenix readers a summary
of my evaluations of DWB for a LaserJet under SCO XENIX 386. Rick's
summary lays out most of the sensible alternatives. I'll add a few
nonsensible ones for the very cost conscious folks :-) My testing was
performed on a system running SCO XENIX 3.2.1.
First off, here are the low-cost options which Rick doesn't cover. These
will most likely be of interest only to SCO XENIX users. If you've got
the text processing package, you've got nroff and a crippled troff, but
no reasonable LaserJet capability. If you are a UNIX user, it would be
silly to spend the money to get a broken troff when you can get a working
one elsewhere for only a little more money.
1) Use nroff. You can cobble together a /usr/lib/term/tabXX table which
will drive the LaserJet. This will give you access to roman, italic,
and bold in a single font size. You can get half-line motions, and
thus play with equations a bit. And if you are really perverted, you
can get the special characters. The problem is that the XENIX package
is 7-bit - nroff can't generate 8-bit characters, and col will eat
them even if it could. My solution was to generate a 2-byte code for
the 8-bit characters, the first byte being a flag ('\0177') saying
set the MSB of the next byte. A filter follows nroff to do the
translation. And "col" is avoided at all costs.
If this is of interest to you, I can probably dredge up my old nroff
driver table generator and the "colpr" filter which does the 8-bit
character hack.
2) Use otroff. The SCO text processing package includes a crufty, old
troff which emits codes for a Wang C/A/T typesetter. Thus, your
problem is to convert this stuff to PCL a LaserJet understands.
Rick's "jetroff" postprocessor does a dandy job of driving a LaserJet,
but it only understands device independent troff output. Thus, the
problem now becomes translating the C/A/T data to dit.
I am aware of two tools which do this. One is called "CAT2dit". It
was written Greg Sassenrath and posted to the net a while back.
Unfortunately, this does not provide for communication of font metrics
between troff, CAT2dit, and jetroff's djet program, and thus the
results were unusable. Mike Slifcak hacked on CAT2dit, made it a bit
smarter about the fonts provided with jetroff, and cleaned it up to
the point where results are now readable, but in my opinion still
unacceptable.
The second tool is "psroff" by Chris Lewis. I have not used this
program myself. However, from the description it sounds like it has
a lot better font handling capabilities, and if you are faced with
making the otroff work, you might want to investigate this route.
Those are the crummy approaches. The sane ones, involve getting a
real DWB, and Rick gave a good rundown. I have tried three of the
options on his list:
- Image Network's xroff
- ISC's Text Processing Workbench + jetroff
- Elan's eroff + jetroff
In all three cases, I evaluated the UNIX/386 version of the package, and
used the SCO /usr/bin/coffconv utility to convert the coff executables
to x.out format. All things seemed to work fine, except "pic" whereby
all versions would dump core on particular files. I have to wonder if
there might be an issue with the floating point emulation when you run
stuff through coffconv.
The cheapest approach is ISC's TPW. However, it gave me the least
satisfactory results. You do get a full DWB 2.0 including the nifty
preprocessors. However, for some reason the inter-character spacing
seemed off a bit. I assume it was either an ISC bug or an ISC/jetroff
interaction issue (or a relic of the coffconv conversion). While not
optimal, the results were certainly acceptable. And thus if you are
looking at the cheapest way to a real troff, this might be a reasonable
approach. Be warned, however, if you try to run this on XENIX, the
distribution is System V filesystem floppies, and thus you'll need a UNIX
machine to mount them and tar up the files for transport to the XENIX
machine.
I spent quite a bit of time playing around with the Image Network xroff.
Of all the solutions I looked at it is strongest in two areas: installation
and fonts. I didn't have to mess around with System V filesystem floppies
or integrating various pieces together. They *do not* offer an all-singing,
all-dancing install script, you just unload the tape and put files where
you want them. You will have to manually go in and edit the xroff script
for your setup. However, if you feel comfortable with minor shell hacking,
then this is no hassle. Configuration scripts are nice if I want to install
the software where the vendor wants and the way he or she wants. Maybe
someday I'll find a vendor who know my machine better than me, and their
install script will work fine. Until that day, I'd prefer the approach
xroff uses. (One exception to the above is that you are still going to
have to put the tmac.* files in /usr/lib/tmac. Or do as I did - put in
dummy files which so'ed the real tmac files.)
The other nice point is that Image Network has a very rich collection of
good quality fonts included in their package. I ended up deleting fonts
because there were so many more than I would ever use. I did find a
couple of small bugs (the "i" in 13pt Helvetica is hosed), but on the
whole extremely good quality. By the way, the XENIX version is older than
their UNIX version, and the font assortment is nowhere as nice.
There are a couple of problems with this package. My biggest problem is
that the backend is closed, which means you can only use their fonts and
postprocessors. If all you want is there, fine, otherwise you are stuck.
For example, bitmap inclusion is not supported yet. If the backend were
open, I could have put jetroff there and done it that way, but I couldn't.
Another minor drawback is that this isn't a full DWB, so you don't get
things like checknr and soelim. Nits, but if you need them you need
them.
The final approach I tried was Elan's eroff. I've avoided Elan for one
reason. I thought their font policy was a scam. You spend almost 900
bucks to get a DWB, and surprise, it's a useless piece of bits because
there are no fonts. But rejoice! They've seen the light. Recently
they've started shipping Times Roman and Helvetica fonts with the package.
I haven't seen them, so I don't know how good they are, but I think it's
important they provide at least something.
Because I didn't have the fonts, I drove the printer with jetroff on the
backend to use it's fonts. Finally, everything fell into place. I had
all the features I wanted, was getting reasonable quality output, and all
the various roff things I've collected over the years seemed compatible.
In article <1990Jul13.152632.5779@pcrat.uucp>
rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson) writes:
>If someone can fill me in on the details I'm missing, I'd appreciate it.
Hokay.
> - Get SCO Eroff for $895. (408) 425-7222.
Don't bother. SCO isn't carrying eroff at the moment. Go right to the
source -- Elan Computer Group at 415-964-2200. They have 286 XENIX,
386 XENIX, and 386 UNIX versions for $795, $895, and $895, respectively.
> - Get Image Network's xroff. Sorry, I don't have a price.
> (415) 967-0542. I have reports that it may be difficult
> or impossible to use alternate device postprocessors with
> xroff. They have an X-windows previewer.
It is $950 for the 2-user version. They have both XENIX and UNIX versions.
The XENIX version appears to be behind the UNIX one. I didn't play with
the X previewer, but it does sound very nice. Even though I didn't go with
their product, they were very helpful and were good folks to work with.
So, to make a boring story long, after months of looking around, I decided
that Elan was the way to go. Now, I'm in the market for some good fonts :-)
--
Chip Rosenthal | You aren't some icon carved out
chip@chinacat.Unicom.COM | of soap, sent down here to clean
Unicom Systems Development, 512-482-8260 | up my reputation. -John Hiattrac@sherpa.UUCP (Roger Cornelius) (07/25/90)
A couple of people (chip@chinacat, rick@pcrat) have recently commented on the various nroff/troff options available for 386 UNIX. I am running SCO UNIX but don't need the laser printer capabilities of the more expensive packages mentioned. I basically need to do formatting of manual pages for online use and sometimes printing to a dot matrix printer. Currently I'm using the Text Processing package which came with my 286 XENIX. It works, but I'd like to upgrade if only to get the increase in performance (XENIX TP is 8086 binaries). Since ISC's package is so cheap, it looks the most attractive to me. My questions are: When I asked ISC whether DWB 2.0 was compatible with SCO's UNIX, they said their stock answer to this question was "not 100% compatible". The person I spoke with couldn't be more specific. Is anyone using ISC's DWB 2.0 on SCO UNIX? Have you found any problem areas? Does it allow you to build your own terminal driver tables as in SCO? Does the ISC product include online manual pages? Thanks for any help. -- Roger A. Cornelius rac@sherpa.UUCP uunet!sherpa!rac
clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis) (07/27/90)
In article <1407@chinacat.Unicom.COM> chip@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Chip Rosenthal) writes: | A couple of weeks back I promised the comp.unix.xenix readers a summary | of my evaluations of DWB for a LaserJet under SCO XENIX 386. Rick's | summary lays out most of the sensible alternatives. I'll add a few | nonsensible ones for the very cost conscious folks :-) My testing was | performed on a system running SCO XENIX 3.2.1. .... | The second tool is "psroff" by Chris Lewis. I have not used this | program myself. However, from the description it sounds like it has | a lot better font handling capabilities, and if you are faced with | making the otroff work, you might want to investigate this route. | Those are the crummy approaches. Hey, I like that. Hasn't even used it and he calls it "crummy" and "nonsensible". Thanks a lot! It's enough to give you a complex! Sheesh. ;-) I think psroff's pretty good. If you don't believe me, because after all I did write the damn thing, how about an unsolicited accolade from a satisfied user? > Rating? Outstanding. If you haven't plunked down your money for the > commercial software, and if you can get by without grap and pic, go > for it! And I didn't pay him *anything* to say that! Seriously. When psroff 2.0 comes out, try it, you might like it.... (Shipping tomorrow, I hope, to comp.sources.unix) And it works with Postscript, ditroff drivers (ie: jetroff!) and X-windows too. Stick *that* in your pipe and smoke it! ;-) Grap and pic are coming too someday.... [It's okay Chip, I know what you meant. I won't send you a bomb this time ;-)] -- Chris Lewis, Elegant Communications Inc, {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis Ferret mailing list: eci386!ferret-list, psroff mailing list: eci386!psroff-list
bin@primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral) (07/27/90)
From article <1990Jul26.213709.28799@eci386.uucp>, by clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis): > Seriously. When psroff 2.0 comes out, try it, you might like it.... > (Shipping tomorrow, I hope, to comp.sources.unix) 2.0 comes out *tomorrow*? What is this that I found on neat.ai.toronto.edu yesterday? > PSROFF RELEASE 2.0 README 2.1 90/07/18 > > May 14, 1990 > > See defs.h for the official Psroff release and patch level. Paul DuBois dubois@primate.wisc.edu
rick@pcrat.uucp (Rick Richardson) (07/28/90)
In article <1990Jul26.213709.28799@eci386.uucp> clewis@eci386.UUCP (Chris Lewis) writes: >Grap and pic are coming too someday.... I believe there was a compile-time option to DWB 1.0's pic that told it to spit periods out in order to draw lines. These would pass thru old-troff and allow pic to work. I know this from making DWB 1.0 pic work at a site full of Sun's and old troff. I remember, though, that it spewed mass quantities of data into troff which blew troff's input buffer, and pic had to be modified (we had source) to work around this problem. It also caused the output of troff, passed thru transcript (CAT->PS conversion, ala psroff) to be absolutely enormous. It worked, but to say I was I little sick to my stomach about the whole configuration would be an understatement. I think for laughs I tried running an earlier cat2dit filter on the pic -> CAT troff output and then running it thru jetroff. The output was still huge, because the damage had already been done by pic dropping dots to construct lines. This is one of the things (font limits and trouble with the MM macros being another) that convinced me that it would be bad karma to help the efforts to extend the life of CAT troff any further. Of course, hobbling around on crutches is better than not walking at all, and Chris put together as comfortable a pair of crutches as can be had. Chrome fender dents, too! I'm not sure how you plan to do pic within the psroff environment, but thats my two cent horror story. Grap, of course, is a preprocessor to pic, so if pic works, so will grap. -Rick -- Rick Richardson | Looking for FAX software for UNIX/386 ??? Ask About: |Mention PC Research,Inc.| FaxiX - UNIX Facsimile System (tm) |FAX# for uunet!pcrat!rick| FaxJet - HP LJ PCL to FAX (Send WP,Word,Pagemaker...)|Sample (201) 389-8963 | JetRoff - troff postprocessor for HP LaserJet and FAX|Output
rick@crash.cts.com (Rick Stout) (07/29/90)
In article <299@sherpa.UUCP> rac@sherpa.UUCP (Roger Cornelius) writes: > >A couple of people (chip@chinacat, rick@pcrat) have recently commented >on the various nroff/troff options available for 386 UNIX. I am running I missed this. Can anyone e-mail or repost? I would like nroff for ODT with some HP LaserJet II support. What is available? I know of eroff from the Elan (sp?) company but their package is $895 I beleive. Is there anything less expensive? Rick ________________________________________________________________________________ Rick Stout ...uunet!eysd!rick Ernst & Young, San Diego (619) 236-1100 ================================================================================
clewis@ecicrl.UUCP (Chris Lewis) (07/29/90)
In article <2833@uakari.primate.wisc.edu> bin@primate.wisc.edu writes: >From article <1990Jul26.213709.28799@eci386.uucp>, by clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis): >> Seriously. When psroff 2.0 comes out, try it, you might like it.... >> (Shipping tomorrow, I hope, to comp.sources.unix) >2.0 comes out *tomorrow*? >What is this that I found on neat.ai.toronto.edu yesterday? >> PSROFF RELEASE 2.0 README 2.1 90/07/18 Ahem. That's a copy of it I punted over there for Mark Moraes and Dave Cahlander to make one last flail at it for use with xtroff. It's not been announced yet. There are a few *teensy* changes in my copy. The "official" 2.0 hasn't yet left eci386. Tonight.... Mark will be providing FTP access, and I hope that I'll get another site or two. -- Chris Lewis, Phone: (416)-294-9253 UUCP: {uunet!mnetor, utcsri!utzoo, uunet!attcan!lsuc}!ecicrl!clewis Moderator of the Ferret Mailing List (ferret-request@eci386) Psroff mailing list (psroff-request@eci386)
clewis@ecicrl.UUCP (Chris Lewis) (07/29/90)
In article <1990Jul28.152314.3839@pcrat.uucp> rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson) writes: |In article <1990Jul26.213709.28799@eci386.uucp> clewis@eci386.UUCP (Chris Lewis) writes: |>Grap and pic are coming too someday.... |I believe there was a compile-time option to DWB 1.0's pic that |told it to spit periods out in order to draw lines. Sort of like using the plot filters on a diablo. At least you'd get sound effects ;-) .... |Of course, hobbling around on crutches is better than not walking |at all, and Chris put together as comfortable a pair of crutches |as can be had. Chrome fender dents, too! You only get dents in 1.0. 2.0's got tail fins and a supercharger. [Rick, did you ever get a chance to run psroff? I never heard back from you when I sent a copy to you. If you did, what drivers did you use?] |I'm not sure how you plan to do pic within the psroff environment, |but thats my two cent horror story. Grap, of course, is a |preprocessor to pic, so if pic works, so will grap. Actually, what I would be doing is having pic generate (or transform via sed script) the drawing commands as something that it passed *thru* troff (analogous to psfig and the \X mechanism in ditroff), and have psroff draw the lines. CAT troff would definately NOT be doing the line drawing. Very simple and cheap in postscript, almost a no-op with ditroff, ugly (but you can't do much better anyway) with LJ. It's not really all that hard to do, psroff can already more-or-less handle psfig (though it's not directly supported in the 2.0 release yet), and handling pic would be about the same complexity. The main difficulty is simply time to do it, the mechanisms are already there. -- Chris Lewis, Phone: (416)-294-9253 UUCP: {uunet!mnetor, utcsri!utzoo, uunet!attcan!lsuc}!ecicrl!clewis Moderator of the Ferret Mailing List (ferret-request@eci386) Psroff mailing list (psroff-request@eci386)
chip@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Chip Rosenthal) (07/30/90)
In article <299@sherpa.UUCP> rac@sherpa.UUCP (Roger Cornelius) writes: >I am running SCO UNIX but don't need the laser printer capabilities of the >more expensive packages mentioned. I basically need to do formatting of >manual pages for online use and sometimes printing to a dot matrix >printer. [...] Is anyone using ISC's DWB 2.0 on SCO UNIX? As I mentioned in my article, I ran the ISC package under XENIX 2.3. The problems I encountered were probably due to the coff to x.out conversion. (I'm hypothesizing that something is going bonkers with the FP emulation.) It should run just fine for what you want. >Does it allow you to build your own terminal driver tables as in SCO? Yes. >Does the ISC product include online manual pages? No. As an aside, I saw SysVr4 last week for the first time. A *very* nice aspect is that the unbundling trend is reversing, and I've been told the license structure encourages shipping an entire package. This means you'd get roff in the base package. I hope when SysVr4 hits the streets, you indeed find troff and man included. -- Chip Rosenthal | You aren't some icon carved out chip@chinacat.Unicom.COM | of soap, sent down here to clean Unicom Systems Development, 512-482-8260 | up my reputation. -John Hiatt
chip@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Chip Rosenthal) (08/02/90)
In article <1443@chinacat.Unicom.COM> chip@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Chip Rosenthal) writes: >In article <299@sherpa.UUCP> rac@sherpa.UUCP (Roger Cornelius) writes: >>Does the ISC product include online manual pages? >No. Sigh. Clarification. ISC TPW includes both on-line man pages and hardcopy man pages for the utilities included in that package. Since we were talking about comparing ISC TPW to the SCO XENIX Text Processing System, I was thinking in those terms, where the man pages for the entire XENIX package come with this one part. ISC, however, starting with 2.2, includes the on-line man pages with each package for the stuff in that package. -- Chip Rosenthal | You aren't some icon carved out chip@chinacat.Unicom.COM | of soap, sent down here to clean Unicom Systems Development, 512-482-8260 | up my reputation. -John Hiatt