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From: ken@rochester.ARPA (SKY)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Why troff?
Message-ID: <24134@rochester.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 23-Jan-87 17:35:47 EST
Article-I.D.: rocheste.24134
Posted: Fri Jan 23 17:35:47 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Jan-87 05:48:22 EST
References: <1244@ucbcad.berkeley.edu> <537@atari.UUCP>
Reply-To: ken@rochester.UUCP (SKY)
Distribution: comp.text
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 24

In article <537@atari.UUCP> apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt) writes:
|There's a deeper reason I'm considering staying with troff: ASCII
|output compatibility.  Nroff provides a handy ASCII-printer and screen
|previewer for my documents (even tables), and you can't write UN*X
|man(1) pages with TeX (because the output isn't readable with more(1)).
|When I want BOTH ASCII output and typeset-quality output from one
|input document, TeX doesn't provide the answer.

I recently posted a postprocessor called DVIDOC that provides
near-printer output for TeX. Basically, it tells TeX that every font it
is using is a pseudo, fixed width font called doc. It is far from
equivalent to nroff because I am not TeXpert to figure out how to
improve it, but it may be a good starting point.

For Internet users, the files are dvidoc.shar[12] in public/latex-style
on cayuga.cs.rochester.edu (a.k.a. rochester.arpa, a.k.a.
192.53.5.209).

Non-Internet users, subscribe to TeXHax to get details of how to
retrieve by mail.

	Ken

PS: It works for 4.[23] BSD. Other OSes will need some work.