Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-ncis!lll-lcc!ames!nrl-cmf!ukma!rutgers!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!andante!alice!debra From: debra@alice.UUCP (Paul De Bra) Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Re: nroff/troff to TeX/LaTex translator Keywords: troff nroff TeX LaTex comp.sources.unix Message-ID: <8765@alice.UUCP> Date: 15 Jan 89 21:02:53 GMT References: <8248@dasys1.UUCP> <1243@indetech.UUCP> Reply-To: debra@alice.UUCP () Organization: AT&T, Bell Labs Lines: 39 In article <1243@indetech.UUCP> david@emerald.UUCP (David Kuder) writes: >In article <8248@dasys1.UUCP> intern@dasys1.UUCP (intern ) writes: >>Is there a troff/nroff to TeX/LaTeX translator? I have a few *roff >>>... >In comp.sources.unix Volume 10, Number 32 there is a package called >tr2latex written by Kamal Al-Yahya . To quote >the introduction to shar: > This program translates troff documents to latex. You will > notice that the translation is not always 100%, but it relieves > one from manual translation, where the user might need to touch > up on the translated document to customize the translation. >I haven't used this extensively so I don't know how effective it is. > >This does however, contradict Paul De Bra who writes in <8738@alice.UUCP>: >>I don't think this exists. Translating a small part of troff may be >>feasible, but troff has many very odd commands (often used in common >>macro packages!) that are very hard or impossible to translate. Oops, didn't look in the sources list... I'll request tr2latex and check it out. Even if it only translates 20% of troff correctly it could be very useful as most normal documents only use about 10% of troff. However, I would be supersurprised if tr2latex could produce a decent latex file from the troff that is generated by monk, tbl, eqn, pic, and other preprocessors. If tr2latex does what the introduction to the shar file says it should generate awful latex input since it won't know what should be in math mode, it won't know what will be a table or a picture, or something else that is special. However, maybe it does NOT translate troff documents to latex but rather tbl, eqn, pic, MM, MS, and other stuff (including a little bit of troff maybe), and that is much more feasible, but is not what the original poster asked for. Can anyone with some experience on tr2latex comment? Paul. -- ------------------------------------------------------ |debra@research.att.com | uunet!research!debra | ------------------------------------------------------