From: Cherniavsky Beni Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Announce: troff emulator in sed (was ANNOUNCE: DJGPP port of Groff 1.16 uploaded) Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2000 12:33:31 +0200 Organization: Technion Lines: 36 Message-ID: <395882FB.6E9BCED1@crosswinds.net> References: <200006251527 DOT LAA08082 AT delorie DOT com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 132.68.54.8 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.06 [en] (WinNT; I) To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Eli Zaretskii wrote: > 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.) I was once (when my interent access was spare) left with some man pages (of RCS - the version I downloaded didn't include preformatted versions) and no ?roff anywhere around my computer. The sources were not too friendly too read but I had "that book" on unix explaining ?roff basics and listing its standard library macros. So I sat down and worte a monsterous `sed' script that proccessed them into readable text. I added some bells-and-whisteles: extracting the macro definistion in the source to another sed script, highlighting things with ^H (use `less' to view) and stiffing dummy characters between non-highlighted chars, running `fold' to fill paragraphs and removing that dummy chars. It's 5 or 6 sed scripts together and a batch file to run it. If anybody is interested in it, for curiosity or because he doesn't want to download groff (the later is not a recommended reason; it outputs only text and not always good) reply and i'll post the scripts or put them on a web page and post a pointer. Only mess-dos could have inspired such a dirty hack. Have a nice hacking, people. -- Beni Cherniavsky (also scben AT t2 in technion) The world is the greatest of all hacks. Admire its bulletproofness - only one reboot was ever done, even it was a soft (wet) one!