Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!pcrat!rick
From: rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: (JetRoff!, Elan or Adobe)... ditroff vs otroff
Message-ID: <655@pcrat.UUCP>
Date: 19 Jan 89 12:40:11 GMT
References: <11759@grebyn.COM> <13748@ico.ISC.COM>
Reply-To: rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson)
Distribution: na
Organization: PC Research, Inc., Tinton Falls, NJ
Lines: 30

In article <13748@ico.ISC.COM> rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) writes:
>Two serious differences:
>
>   Ditroff provides hooks for the newer preprocessors pic and grap; these
>   aren't supported (as far as any implementations I know of) under old
>   troff.

You can use 'pic' with old troff.  I know an installation that
does exactly this.  It requires that pic be compiled to handle
this (and, you have to fart around inside of pic because the
compile option isn't exactly bugless).  Without pic source,
its hopeless.

What happens then is that pic tells 'troff' to drop dots (periods)
in order to form splines, arcs, circles, etc.  One period at
a time.  It is horribly slow, and not very pretty.  I can't
recommend this setup, and yet I know that people are generating
significant documents with pic in this manner.

Since grap is really a preprocessor to 'pic', it ought to work
as well, though I've never seen this myself.

Despite the fact that it can be done without ditroff,
I'd agree with most everyone that you want a "ditroff" setup.

-- 
Rick Richardson | JetRoff "di"-troff to LaserJet Postprocessor|uunet!pcrat!dry2
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