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From: rbraun@spdcc.COM (Rich Braun)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386,comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: YELP about obtaining nroff (longish)
Keywords: nroff groff psroff man Coherent
Message-ID: <6408@spdcc.SPDCC.COM>
Date: 9 Feb 91 23:07:48 GMT
References: <1991Feb07.195547.22813@crom2.uucp>
Followup-To: comp.unix.sysv386
Distribution: na
Organization: Kronos Inc., Waltham, Mass.
Lines: 22

jim@crom2.uucp (James P. H. Fuller) writes:
>In summary, I've really run into a blank wall on this.
>
>   WHERE CAN I GET NROFF?  (I can't FTP, I'm a uucp-only site.)
>
>   Or where can I get fake nroff, or enough of nroff to read ...

This frustrated me too, but there is a simple solution.  Get flex from
uunet.uu.net in directory comp.sources.unix/volume19/flex2 (files part01-07),
and get xfmt from the same system (file comp.sources.unix/volume16/xfmt.Z).

This will fix your problem; you can then type 'xfmt -mu foo.man > foo.1' to
create readable man pages.  It uses termcap to translate certain escape
sequences.  I also had to patch a couple of places in xfmt source, because
it assumes 'printf ("%s", NULL)' prints nothing whereas the Microsoft
library prints '(null)' for that case.  That's the only source bug I can
recall.

I know nothing about how to use uucp, but I know uunet is easy enough to
get to.

-rich