Top Document: comp.text Frequently Asked Questions Previous Document: TR1. What is troff? Why are there so many questions about it? Next Document: TR3. What are some of the filters for troff output? See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge The original Ossanna troff generates proprietary printer codes for the Wang C/A/T Phototypesetter; we'll call this "CAT Troff". This version comes bundled in many systems, in particular, SunOS, most other Berkeley-derived systems, some SVR4s and is contained in the Xenix Text Processing package. The AT&T, BSD and Xenix variants all differ slightly, but not in any important ways. CAT troff is useless without filters to convert the "CAT codes" to something else, especially since the C/A/T is as common as a California condor. These filters are described later. In 1981, Brian Kernighan of Bell Laboratories rewrote troff to generate a generic typesetting language. These troffs are called "ditroff" (for device-independent troff) and contain some additional features such as arbitrary line drawing, and more flexible font handling. "Documenter's Workbench" (DWB) is a package containing ditroff and several other typesetting filters. The latest AT&T version is DWB 3.4.1, which sold as source code; most commercial binary variants (Elan, SoftQuad, Image Network, etc.) are based on DWB 2.0. The Free Software Foundation distributes a re-engineered version of ditroff called groff. If you have a troff and want to know which it is, type: troff < /dev/null > /dev/null If it responds with "typesetter busy" or "No /dev/cat; use -t or -a", you have CAT troff, otherwise it's ditroff. If you get an answer from: dwbv you have the AT&T release 3.0 or later. The differences are too numerous and subtle to document here, but the variants are about 95% compatible. All are ASCII based, but DWB 3.4, Groff and AIX 3.2's troff also accept ISO 8859-1 (aka ISO Latin 1), the Western European character set and are 8 bit clean. Any 8-bit clean ditroff can be reconfigured to support alternate 8859-x character sets. AIX 3.2 ditroff also supports Kanji (multi-byte) to a certain extent (as per IBM-932). See TR16 for more on DWB. User Contributions:Top Document: comp.text Frequently Asked Questions Previous Document: TR1. What is troff? Why are there so many questions about it? Next Document: TR3. What are some of the filters for troff output? Single Page [ Usenet FAQs | Web FAQs | Documents | RFC Index ] Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer: textfaq@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Text FAQ commentary reception)
Last Update March 27 2014 @ 02:12 PM
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