Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!mcvax!ukc!icdoc!qmc-cs!liam
From: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: sorting in troff(nroff)
Message-ID: <177@cs.qmc.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 4-Aug-86 06:06:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: cs.177
Posted: Mon Aug  4 06:06:18 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 6-Aug-86 02:49:04 EDT
References: <320@cord.UUCP> <174@cs.qmc.ac.uk> <7005@utzoo.UUCP>
Reply-To: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts)
Organization: CS Dept, Queen Mary College, University of London, UK.
Lines: 24
Keywords: troff

In article <7005@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP writes:

>I actually wrote
>(in awk) a "text preprocessor" for troff at one point.  It did the same
>sort of thing for ordinary text that eqn does for equations:  emit it as
>detailed instructions for troff, checking to see whether a line was full
>or not, doing line breaks, etc.  Worked all right.  Not useful, but fun.

In a recent paper about his version of Knuth's WEB system,
adapted for use with C and troff, Harold Thimbleby observes
that "The code which did the formatting for a draft printer was
about the same size as the code which prepared the same file to
be formatted by troff. Telling troff what to do is as hard as
actually doing it."

He also mentioned having once written a troff program to
produce Pascal7s triangle - at least the formatting of the
result was easier than in Pascal!

-- 

William Roberts         ARPA: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk  (gw: cs.ucl.edu)
Queen Mary College      UUCP: liam@qmc-cs.UUCP
LONDON, UK              Tel:  01-980 4811 ext 3900