Interesting. That sounds like a different commercial strain, "SoftQuad was started in order to improve automated typesetting at Toronto's Coach House Press, and for many years developed an enhanced commercial version of the text formatting program troff, developed under license from AT&T, called sqtroff. It was sold with a suite of associated programs, corresponding to AT&T's Documenter's Workbench, under the name SoftQuad Publishing Software (SQPS)." On Mon, Mar 7, 2022 at 6:28 AM Jaap Akkerhuis <jaapna(a)xs4all.nl> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 9, 2022 at 3:30 PM Andrew Diller <dillera(a)gmail.com> wrote: It's basically a marketing name for troff and some macro packages. You could try feeding some of these https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/tree/master/doc through it to see how it works, although depending on what 4.x really is it may be a bit of a learning experience. Aside from the man pages and official documentation, a lot of popular books were and still are written with it https://www.troff.org/pubs.html

On Sun, Mar 6, 2022 at 6:02 PM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com> wrote: I'd be interested to pin down the timeline and the major feature changes for DWB in relation to the other troff variants as well. Below is a summary of my understanding from looking at the changelogs and spot checking the various codebases. Any additions or corrections would be appreciated. 1979 v7 C/A/T troff released (rewritten from assembler into C) 1980-81 v7 C/A/T troff pulled into System III internally at Bell Labs seemingly without major changes and released in 1982 1982 public domain typesetter independent troff (ditroff or titroff) was the last free release as a standalone set of files on request 1983 SVR1 bundled C/A/T troff from 1981 1984 SVR2 containing DWB 2.0 incorporating ditroff (no postscript output yet though) 1987 SVR3 unbundled all troff versions and offered DWB 2+ as an add-on package 1988 postscript output added to DWB 2+ 1989 SVR4 bundled DWB 2+ (Solaris and Unixware) with changes through mid-1988 198907 DWB 3.0 changed font tables to ascii from old binary format 199004 DWB 3.1 retired nroff for monolithic troff binary with -a flag for simplified ascii output (for example, tables are not formatted for true hardcopy output in ascii format) I think sqtroff from Softquad was primarily sold from 1987-88 and the main enhancement was more detailed error tracing with an improved ditroff output language including early laserjet and postscript support. I've only seen mentions of sqtroff 2.x releases in that timeframe. I've been looking for the Softquad documentation and software without much luck; apparently James Clark had a copy of the Technical Reference manual (ISBN 0-88910-326-7) that he used to write groff. Best, Dan Plassche