Newsgroups: comp.text
Path: utzoo!telly!eci386!woods
From: woods@eci386.uucp (Greg A. Woods)
Subject: Re: Xroff -- Request for Comments/Gripes
Message-ID: <1991May7.170631.14030@eci386.uucp>
Reply-To: woods@eci386.UUCP (Greg A. Woods)
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc.
References: <1991May3.163405.23681@solbourne.com> <1983@chinacat.Unicom.COM>
Distribution: usa
Date: Tue, 7 May 1991 17:06:31 GMT

In article <1983@chinacat.Unicom.COM> chip@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Chip Rosenthal) writes:
> In article <1991May3.163405.23681@solbourne.com>
> 	tsmith@solbourne.com (Terry Smith) writes:
> >Any Xroff users out there?

I'm not an Xroff user, so you might want to take my comments in
stride.  I do however have extensive (user) experience with V7-troff,
DWB-1.0, DWB-2.0, and SQtroff.

> I like xroff.  It and Elan seemed to be the two most robust DWB's I
> looked at.

Just what do you mean by robust?  I've only once encountered a
non-robust DWB, and that was the initial SysV/386 DWB-2.0.  The first
version of tbl from that release usually dumped core.  Some vendors
fixed it before the released it, others didn't.  Other than that, I've
rarely seen anything in any DWB behave rudely or dump core, thus I'd
call them all robust.

> The thing which was a total knock-out punch for xroff is the fact that
> the backend is not ditroff compatible - nor was it documented.
> Therefore, if you've got any tools for printer handling, fonts, etc.
> they are useless.  I needed this capability, and thus xroff was rendered
> unusable for my needs.

This does sound like a *VERY* important consideration.  There are lots
of tools for dealing with di-troff output....  Even though SoftQuad
enhanced their SQtroff output, they did fully document it (not that
it's hard to understand in the first place!), and they also provided a
filter to convert it back into di-troff(5).
-- 
							Greg A. Woods
woods@{eci386,gate,robohack,ontmoh,tmsoft}.UUCP		ECI and UniForum Canada
+1-416-443-1734 [h]  +1-416-595-5425 [w]  VE3TCP	Toronto, Ontario CANADA
Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible-ORWELL