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From: ilan343@violet.berkeley.edu (Geraldo Veiga)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Price of DWB 3.1
Message-ID: <1990Nov28.225235.8643@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 28 Nov 90 22:52:35 GMT
References: <16706@letni.UUCP> <652@silence.princeton.nj.us> <1990Nov28.193202.19684@cbnewsl.att.com>
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In article <1990Nov28.193202.19684@cbnewsl.att.com> npn@cbnewsl.att.com (nils-peter.nelson) writes:
>
>It was certainly my own personal preference to package DWB
>with UNIX. I lost. As a result, the current UNIX shipped by
>USL doesn't even include the 'man' command (because man
>relies on nroff).

I've been looking into 386 SysV 4.0  recently and at least 2 of them --
Dell and Microport -- say they include some version of troff.  Does any
one know what version of troff (if any) is included with the official
Sys V 4.0 release?  I couldn't figure out from the information vendors
gave me, but at least one of them told me that they used whatever
version they have to generate their published versions of the manuals.

From the point of view of an end user, I think DWB is in trouble
whatever AT&T does with it (short of giving it away).
I am a troff user moving more and more into the TeX world.
I'd love to have some usable version of DWB 3.1 with whatever PC Unix I
decide on, but I doubt I'd be willing to pay whatever VARs will have
to charge for the binaries.  Without arguing technical issues, the
portability of TeX makes it the unavoidable choice.  It runs anywhere
and prints to any printer.  With most users moving to PCs or
workstations for their writing chores, AT&T has to rethink
dramatically how their software is distributed.

>My own personal vision is for DWB to be something you can
>count on wherever you compute. It's not the sexiest formatter
>around, but it is the most dependable. I can ship troff files
>to any of several thousand people inside AT&T via e-mail with
>confidence that they will be able to run off exactly what I
>intended on their local printer. Unlike PostScript, these
>files are revisable and so promote multiple-authored, inter-
>location documents.  That's our target: distributed,
>multi-machine, multi-vendor environment with "industrial
>strength" needs (dozens to thousands of pages).

Maybe internally at AT&T it might be possible, but it is too late for
the rest of the world.  I deal with 2 different versions of troff/DWB
and they have very different features.  I use DWB 2.0 on a 3b2 where I
use "grap", but I have no useful printer support, no bibliography
package, no ms macros. The version I use under BSD have the "bib"
bibliography package, PS filters, but an older ditroff, no grap and an
ancient version of "mm".  After some gimnastics I can come up with a
"portable" version of the document, but the actual source cannot be
shipped back and forth between co-authors.

	Geraldo