replacement for nroff (was Re: RMS says: "Use BSD, for goodness sake!")

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, Mark Murray wrote:

> You'd lose the ability to read man pages. This is not low-impact.

I have been trying old awf and cawf.

cawf is a C version of Henry Spencer's Amazingly Workable (text)
Formatter by Vic Abell.

I have built it under NetBSD.

It supports various nroff and -man, -me and -ms, but it needs various
additions to its macros. For example, it needs:

.It Pa -- it wants lowercase .it
.Xr
.Sh  -- it wants .SH
.Nm
.Dt -- it wants .DT
.Dd
.Nd -- it wants .ND
.Op Fl
.Bl

The 4.10 version I have been looking at is from
http://www.tux.org/pub/sites/vic.cc.purdue.edu/

You can find man pages for cawf via google.
http://minix1.bio.umass.edu/pub/minix.2.0/2.0.0/wwwman/man1/nroff.1.html
Also look at http://www.moon-soft.com/program/C/C2/C-43/CAWF407/00DIFFS

Is anyone interested in helping with improving this?

Also I read that some old freeware versions of nroff are available
(probably for old MSDOS). Does anyone have any URLs for these?

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/