Masao Uebayashi <uebayasi@pultek.co.jp> writes:
> > However, is it really true that there has never been a version of
> > troff that handled Japanese? If so, what were the Japanese language
> > man pages I used to have on my old Sony NEWS machine written with?
> 
> There should have been many attempts to make roff able to handle
> Japanese.  It's quite possible for NEWS people to develop their own
> Japanese roff, considering their skill.  The problem may be that
> Japanized roffs are VERY specific to Japanese.

Hmm. On my NEWS machine (this was around 1988 or 1989), there were
both Japanese and English man pages. They appeared to both use
troff. I do not know for sure as I never checked or cannot remember. :(

I wonder if any of the people who made the NEWS machines might be
found -- maybe they have good ideas to share?

> No internationalized typesetting systems are coming to my mind right
> now...

My O'Reilly book "CJKV Information Processing" (CJKV = Chinese,
Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) claims there have been Japanese
versions of both TeX and troff, but it gives no information on where
to find them. :( :(

(By the way, for my Japanese friends, this is a good book to recommend
to Westerners to explain how Japanese language processing works. It
explains many things very well for the English speaker.)

Perry