Message-Id:	<200005251620.MAA01756@delorie.com>
Date:	Thu, 25 May 2000 13:46:22 +0300 (IDT)
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
X-Sender:	eliz AT is
To:	djgpp-announce AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	ANNOUNCE: DJGPP port of Groff 1.15 uploaded
Reply-To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com

This is to announce that the DJGPP port of version 1.15 of the
Groff package is available from SimTel.NET mirrors worldwide:

 ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2gnu/gro115b.zip
 ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2gnu/gro115s.zip

Groff is a document-formatting and typesetting package.  It belongs to an 
older generation of word-processing software that is not WYSIWYG; 
instead, you edit the document source with a text editor, intersperse the 
text with special directives that specify fonts and formatting 
parameters, and then submit the source to a batch processor which produces 
a ready-to-print or ready-to-read document.  troff, a program that is 
standard on Unix, is used, even today, to write manual pages (those *.1 
files you find in the man subdirectory of the DJGPP installation tree), 
but it can also be used for writing very large and complex documents.
(Another, more modern program from the family of batch word-processors is 
TeX.)

The DJGPP port of Groff is mainly used to format man pages.  However, if 
you are interested in typesetting and word processing, you will find in 
Groff a wealth of useful information and algorithms.  In particular, this 
is one of the few GNU packages (perhaps even the only one) which is 
written in C++.

Groff is the GNU implementation of the Unix-standard utilities troff and 
nroff, and their companions pic, eqn, tbl, soelim, and others.  It also 
includes many macro packages, including man, the package for formatting 
man pages.

The main user-level change in this release is the addition of the HTML 
driver, which means you can now easily produce man pages in HTML format.
A bug in the Postscript driver, whereby Groff would print an error 
message when invoked with the -Tps switch, is solved in this port.  See 
the file NEWS in the distribution for the full list of changes.

Ironically, the new version 1.16 of Groff was just released the other 
day.  It is a large step forward, with many changes; retrofitting the 
DJGPP-specific patches into it would delay the release of this port for 
too much.  Since a new port is long overdue, I decided not to wait.

Please direct any further discussions about this port to 
comp.os.msdos.djgpp news group (or write to its e-mail gateway 
djgpp AT delorie DOT com).

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