Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!haven!mimsy!fnord.umiacs.umd.edu!steve
From: steve@fnord.umiacs.umd.edu (Steven D. Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix
Subject: Re: Postscript output from troff
Message-ID: <17995@mimsy.UUCP>
Date: 9 Jun 89 17:53:14 GMT
References: <17859@mimsy.UUCP> <532@elan.UUCP>
Sender: nobody@mimsy.UUCP
Reply-To: steve@fnord.umiacs.umd.edu (Steven D. Miller)
Organization: UMIACS, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
Lines: 34

To summarize the message I was about to send, but thought better of:  the
troff on DECstations, like the troff on 4.3BSD and Ultrix VAXen, and on Suns
running SunOS 3.2 and 4.0.1, *can and does* know about font width tables.
You use -F to specify where to look, and it seems that you have to use .fp
(i.e., '.fp 1 R') directives to force the width tables to be read.  On all
the above machines, including the DECstation, I get the desired behavior --
the tables are indeed read in.  However, now that I look more closely at the
release notes, I see that the DECstation troff has been modified to use
ASCII-format font width tables.

No doubt the folks at DEC ran into the same problem I had:  the tables are
compiled with cc, and a.out != COFF.  I chose to write a COFF -> a.out font
width table converter.  The people at DEC chose to change the font width
table format, which may be unwise, given the number of people Out There who
are using font width tables they get from various sources, and which are
all in a.out format.  Sigh.

Anyway, the new format doesn't seem to be documented anywhere that I yet
know about.  Also, it sure looks a lot like DEC has made a mistake, and
is shipping the font width tables in the old format, even on DECstations.
Both the Ultrix unsupported (RISC) tapes I have definitely have the old
format files on them; I just went through the pain of checking them.
Oops...

(And, blast it, the 4.3BSD troff, if compiled on a DECstation, dumps core!
Never debug troff on a full stomach!)

So, does anyone Out There know anything about the new format, and can they
describe it?

	-Steve

Spoken: Steve Miller    Domain: steve@mimsy.umd.edu    UUCP: uunet!mimsy!steve
Phone: +1-301-454-1808  USPS: UMIACS, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742