WWB wouldn't exist if text had not routinely existed in machine-readable form, thanks to word-processing. But the impetus for WWB came from "style", not from troff. Style was a spinoff of Lorinda Cherry's "parts", which assigned parts of speech to the words of a document. Style provided a statistical profile of the text: measures such as average word length: frequency of passives, adjectives and compound sentences, reading level, etc. WWB in turn offered writing advice based on such profiles. Style was stimulated by Bill Vesterman, a professor of English at Rutgers, who brought the idea to me. I introduced him to Lorinda, who had it running in a couple of weeks. Then Nina McDonald at USG conceived and packaged WWB as a distinct product, not just a collection of entries in man 1. Wikipedia reports a surmise that WWB sank out of sight because it was not a standard part of Unix distributions. Doug