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From: jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: help with sys file
Message-ID: <1991May23.234055.1233@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 23 May 91 23:40:55 GMT
Article-I.D.: agate.1991May23.234055.1233
References: <1991May19.014130.25630@unixland.uucp> <1991May19.023101.29200@zoo.toronto.edu> <1991May23.221143.8781@unixland.uucp>
Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root)
Reply-To: jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 24

In article <1991May23.221143.8781@unixland.uucp>, bill@unixland.uucp (Bill Heiser) writes:
> You guys did well by putting lots of documentation with CNEWS, but 
> unfortunately not all of us have the appropriate facilities for reading
> it.

But you do; there are several alternatives for troff-like document preparation
without AT&T-supplied troff or nroff.

First, there's awk, the Amazingly Workable Formatter, written by Henry Spencer,
and available for anonymous FTP from cs.toronto.edu.  Grab pub/awf.shar.Z.
It's actually written in awk!  It implements a subset of nroff, the -man
macros, and the -ms macros.

If you want a more serious package, there's groff from the Free Software
Foundation.  You need a C++ compiler to make this work, but the FSF supplies
this too.  groff (including tbl, eqn, pic, etc) is a much more complete
emulation of nroff/troff.

Curses on AT&T for unbundling the "Documenter's Workbench" to make extra
money.

--
Joe Buck
jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu	 {uunet,ucbvax}!galileo.berkeley.edu!jbuck