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From: michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: troff/nroff question (Was: Why troff?)
Message-ID: <249@bcsaic.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 27-Jan-87 11:48:11 EST
Article-I.D.: bcsaic.249
Posted: Tue Jan 27 11:48:11 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 29-Jan-87 06:26:56 EST
References: <362@linus.UUCP> <106@tg.UUCP> <1556@trwrb.UUCP>
Reply-To: michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (Michael Maxwell)
Distribution: comp.text
Organization: Boeing Computer Services AI Center, Seattle
Lines: 34
Keywords: TeX, troff

The discussion on troff vs. TeX brings up some roff questions I have.  (We
don't have TeX, or else they might be TeX questions :-)
In article <1556@trwrb.UUCP> simpson@trwrb.UUCP (Scott Simpson) writes:
>Troff disadvantages
>-- Two character command names.
>...with two letters it is easy to
>come up with names for two different macros that clash.

Does anyone have a list of register/string names that the me macros use
internally?  I could (and have) gone through the macros w/ sed looking for
these, but I suspect I've missed a few...

>-- Macros are often bizarre collection of symbols.

The me macros file we have says a "commented version is available."  We don't
seem to have it.  Where can I find one?

>-- nroff
>	Troff has an equivalent program to output to an ASCII device.
>TeX doesn't.  This is nice.  Unfortunately, besides the obvious things like 
>line breaks, troff and nroff output does not always come out the same.

Last week I was working on a troff file that had lots of font size changes.  I
tried to preview it with nroff, but nroff ignored the font sizes when it
decided line length, so the previewed version had little resemblance to the
troff output.  I'm not so interested in whether things are centered nicely on
my nroff preview as I am in finding out where page breaks will be etc.  Is
there any way to get nroff to change line length/height depending on the font
size?  I suppose this would require major hacking of nroff...
-- 
Mike Maxwell
Boeing Advanced Technology Center
	arpa: michaelm@boeing.com
	uucp: uw-beaver!uw-june!bcsaic!michaelm