Minix1.5/commands/nroff/README

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nroff (TOS, Minix) v0.99 BETA 2/26/90 wjr
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This is an improved release of a version of nroff for both Minix and the
atariST. It was written under TOS and 4BSD unix but should port easily to
Minix ST as well. Unfortunately I have no access to Minix (hopefully
someone did test this before sending it out...ast?).

Much of this works. The things that (still) don't are all the hard things:
diversions, traps, conditionals, etc. See the man pages for what is not
supported (yet). Font switching, underlining, etc. are limited to reverse
video on the screen, though stdout will contain underlines as "_^H" for
printers.

There is a crude man package included (tmac.an) which is still not right
but is better and needs diversions to become right. It should handle most
common man tasks, though. It gets installed in /usr/lib/tmac under Minix
unless you change the location in nroff.h. For testing, you can

	% setenv TMACDIR .
	% nroff -man file

to use tmac.an (say) in the cwd.

For porting info, look in nroff.h and the makefile. The termcap library
is used to get standout capabilites for doing bold and italics to the
screen. Minix and BSD have termcap(3) and S5R3 has terminfo, which I
believe also includes the tgetent/tgetnum/tgetflag/tgetstr functions for
compatibility.

If you want to try and use nroff for printer output, the termcap library
looks for TERMCAP in your environment (a file) so that you could do:

	% env TERMCAP=printfile nroff -man file

and substitute your own file with so (standout) for your printer. This
assumes your system has env, but you get the idea.

The program is small enough to work under Minix. It does not have a large
stack, but does store all macros and strings in a common namespace. Look
in nroff.h for the size.

If you do hack away, I would appreciate you sending me the changes
so I can keep this centralized.

The future holds increased capabilites, though I find it pretty useful
as it is. Most man things are possible and you can do reports and resumes
and such without much problem. See the example files included (ex[12].nr).

-Bill Rosenkranz
rosenkra@hall.cray.com