groff alternative?

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Peter Jeremy wrote:

>On Fri, 2005-Apr-29 00:55:41 +0100, Alex Zbyslaw wrote:
>  
>
>>Since no-one had a sensible answer, why not try a version of original 
>>nroff from say 4.3BSD.  Hunting around, I found this: 
>>http://www.tuhs.org/.  Hopefully the most used macros will have stayed 
>>the same.
>>    
>>
>
>Actually, they haven't.  The FreeBSD man pages are written using mdoc(7),
>not man(7).  The current version of mdoc(7) in FreeBSD needs long names -
>which are supported by ditroff and groff but not the older nroff.
>  
>
Ever a sucker for punishment, I downloaded 4.3bsd nroff and pretty much 
it seems to work*.  This is on 4.11.  The tmac.an macros load tmac.doc.  
There may be some new macros defined since the days of 4.3 but I doubt  
anything critical has changed.

Peter, did you mean that the macro definition file uses long 
definitions?  If so, I don't think that matters since I proposed using 
the original tman.an/tmac.doc macros which would obviously be 
compatible.   Just that new man pages might use a macro which wasn't 
defined in those old definitions files.

A tar.gz is a massive 124K (source only) so, Emanuel, if you want to try 
it I can mail it to you.  (It was you asked the original question, 
wasn't it?)

* I have formatted a massive 3 random manual pages, and got one bad 
definition, but the page viewed fine.

If anyone cares to repeat the feat, I used the 4.3BSD-Reno src.  I 
needed src.tar.gz and usr.tar.gz form which I extracted usr.bin/roff, 
libdata/term/tablpr, libdata/term and share/tmac.  I put the whole thing 
under /usr/local/43bsd, fixed a couple pathname.h files and wrote the 
stupidest shell script because Makefiles created umpteen problems.  When 
it all compiles in 5 seconds, makefiles are somewhat moot :-).  In 
usr.bin/roff/nroff

    cc -c  -DNROFF -DVMUNIX -I../common_source *.c
    cd ../common_source
    cc -c  -DNROFF -DVMUNIX -I. *.c
    cd ../nroff
    cc -o nroff *.o ../common_source/*.o -lcompat

And fixed the hardwired pathnames in tmac.an.

The list of 4BSD archive sites is at 
http://www.tuhs.org/archive_sites.html and I used the York/UK one.

--Alex

PS I have redirected back to questions where this thread started.  
Doesn't seem that relevant to current.