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From: stan@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Stan Osborne)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Printing Sybase Docs
Message-ID: <844@toaster.SFSU.EDU>
Date: 23 Aug 90 04:45:45 GMT
References: <1990Aug22.162141.25824@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <6607@milton.u.washington.edu> <6612@milton.u.washington.edu>
Organization: San Francisco State University
Lines: 41

In article <6612@milton.u.washington.edu> wrb@milton.u.washington.edu (William Barker) writes:
>Regarding the Sybase docs printing problem, NextAnswers came through.  I
>should have looked there first!
>
>Seems there are some roff codes (.Sc) related to figures that cause the
>printing to bomb.  Edit out those codes, and the docs print fine, albeit 
>without the figures.  Oh well....
>
".Sc" is the name of a macro defined in "tmac.syb" the Sybase troff macros.

All of the "SCREEN" style examples used by ".Sc" were left out when Sybase
copied over the manual sources.

In addition to leaving out examples that are normally included in the
manual, there are no instructions on how to convert the troff source
into something humans more easily understand.  It would have been
nice if they had provided a "makefile" and had tested it on a clean
system to confirm it really would work for all next customers. 

The Sybase documentation provided with the system can only be made
usable (barely) by someone who has access to NextAnswers or has
experience dealing with incomplete and makefile-less troff source code.
It is very likely Businessland customers will have neither of these.
I can only imagine the problems this causes Sybase when new NeXT customers
call them and ask them for help deciphering the files they find in
/NextLibrary/Documentation/Sybase.  

----

In a previous posting I said I had worked around bugs and
was processing the manuals.  I should have qualified my statement
by saying I was doing my best to work around the missing SCREEN format
examples and missing makefiles. 

I hope these problems are amoung those corrected with the 2.0 release 
rumored for later this year

Stan
-- 
Stan Osborne, Computer Science Department, San Francisco State University
Internet: stan@cs.sfsu.edu    Usenet: cshub!stan    Voice: (415) 338-2168