Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!smoke.cs.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!moraes
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
From: moraes@cs.toronto.edu (Mark Moraes)
Subject: Re: previewer for troff or postscript
Message-ID: <90Feb15.001555est.643@smoke.cs.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
References: <8167@chaph.usc.edu>
Distribution: na
Date: 15 Feb 90 05:16:25 GMT
Lines: 48

[One more for the Frequently Asked Questions list, perhaps?]

lord@alcor.usc.edu (Brian Lord) writes:
>Is there a previewer for troff or postscript that will work under X11?

X.V11R4 has two previewers for device-independent troff.  (Device
independent troff is part of the Documenter's Workbench from AT&T as
ditroff, some vendors have actually ported it to their machines)
xditview in the core distribution and xtroff in contrib.  Small fix
needed to compile R4 xtroff enclosed below.

If by troff you mean the antique version that some vendors ship (The
one that usually says "Typesetter busy." when you run it with no
arguments), then you may want to try converting from its output to
ditroff output using Chris Lewis' psroff (posted to comp.sources.unix
in Volume 20, see your neighbourhood archive site, or get a newer
version by anon. ftp from gatekeeper.dec.com in
/pub/misc/psroff-pl7.tar.Z) and then using xditview or xtroff.  I
haven't tried this -- some hacking may be required.

Elan and SoftQuad ship eroff and sqtroff respectively -- both are
enhanced and have previewers for X, I believe.  (I haven't used either
of them)

A PostScript previewer exists -- known to run on R3 (should work under
R4, but I haven't tried yet) -- see contrib/xps.tar.Z available for
anon. ftp from expo.lcs.mit.edu and other archive sites.  It does a
reasonably complete job on Suns of previewing most PostScript, modulo a
lack of good fonts.  (Portable PostScript, Hah!)

Another PostScript previewer, GNU ghostscript sort of runs on X11 --
I've only ever seen it run on Ultrix uVaxen -- it had some vax
dependencies in the bad old days of 1.2 or so, and I haven't tried it
since.  It also firmly believed the only possible window size to be
640x400 or suchlike, and I don't recall convincing it otherwise.
Maybe when 1.4 shows up on prep...  (there's a 1.4beta on uunet, I
think) I believe it works much better on IBM-PCs with EGA.

xtroff needs the following fix to xwindows.c.  I'll issue a real
patch Real Soon Now.

34c34
< # define XtScrollBarSetThumb XawScrollbarSetThumb
---
> # define XtScrollBarSetThumb XawScrollBarSetThumb

---
If it doesn't have (device-independent) troff, it ain't Real Unix :-(