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From: trt@rti-sel.UUCP (Tom Truscott)
Newsgroups: net.text,net.unix-wizards
Subject: Re: ditroff on Goulds
Message-ID: <741@rti-sel.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 27-Mar-86 16:15:27 EST
Article-I.D.: rti-sel.741
Posted: Thu Mar 27 16:15:27 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Mar-86 06:08:44 EST
References: <857@tektools.UUCP>
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, NC
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Xref: watmath net.text:1006 net.unix-wizards:17376

> Has anyone out there brought  ditroff up on a Gould and lived to  tell ...

We have had ditroff (Lou Salkind's revised standard version)
running on our Gould for a couple years now.
The main (only?) problem with troff was code of the form:
	unsigned int t;

	if (t == -1) ...	/* Never true on UTX */
I fixed the N places in the code with
	if (t == (unsigned int)-1) /* portability, the futile frontier */

There is also a problem in pic due to a 'bug' in yacc:
objects of type YYSTYPE are not aligned correctly when makeattr is called
(the second arg is correctly declared YYSTYPE in misc.c
but not passed that way from pic.y).
The symptom is that pic core dumps, the fix is to add a middle
dummy argument in calls to makeattr so that the alignment is correct.
------------------

On a vaguely related subject, we are expecting release 2
of the Documenter's Workbench any day now.  Is anyone else expecting same,
or are we naive?  We have been unable to get any documentation
on it, of any sort, and indeed documentation is claimed to be the
reason it was not out in early March.
It has been six years since Brian Kernighan knocked out ditroff,
and that is plenty of time to improve it to support a zillion typesetters,
fonts, and macro packages, providing better graphics than old pic,
generalized index generation, and other utilities with simplify
document preparation and formatting.  Is this a dream?
	Tom Truscott