Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Speaking of Unix, unbundling, etc...
Message-ID: <8050@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 9 Jun 88 01:43:31 GMT
References: <7933@ncoast.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 18

In article <7933@ncoast.UUCP> allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
>On unbundling:
>I have never used *troff, pic, *eqn, etc. and rarely used tbl or nroff with
>anything except man page source.  DWB and WWB could be replaced with a
>small, fast program to format the majority of man pages without affecting me
>or most others that I know.

This has in fact been done.  Many systems come with "cattable" manual
entries (preformatted, typically for a fairly dumb terminal such as
tty37, sometimes requiring an appropriate output filter to handle
embedded escape sequences).  At one point UNIX System V and/or DWB
also had an "sroff" formatter which was meant to be a fast replacement
for "nroff -mm".  Presumably most nroff users could survive with just
catman and sroff.  I think sroff died somewhere along the way, though.

By the way, WWB is the Writer's WorkBench, which is mostly a set of
tools for evaluating document style etc.  It has very little to do
with text formatting.