At Tue, 3 Mar 2009 08:38:02 -0500, Thor Lancelot Simon
<tls%rek.tjls.com@localhost> wrote:
Subject: Re: roff from 4.4BSD [Re: groff/-mandoc replacement]
>
> I looked at the Plan 9 roff last time this came up, but IIRC it too is
> C/A/T, not ditroff, isn't it? It also relies on a bunch of Plan 9
> libraries which are of questionable utility for anything else in our
> system.
Plan 9 troff is actually descended from ditroff (I believe it was
derived from the version in Tenth Edition, as was DWB-3.4). The Plan 9
version of course supports UTF-8, just as you would expect it to.
If I'm not mistaken the work of porting it back to a more-or-less POSIX
environment has already been done too, though perhaps the easiest way to
get it working would be through the "Plan 9 From User Space" project by
Russ Cox:
http://swtch.com/plan9port/
There's also a somewhat older version of Documenter's Workbench Release
3.3, available under the CPL:
http://www.research.att.com/~gsf/cgi-bin/download.cgi?action=list&name=dwb
http://www.research.att.com/~gsf/download/tgz/dwb.1993-02-04.tgz
and who knows, perhaps a query to Glenn Fowler might prompt release of
the latest available version of DWB under CPL too.
However now that I've looked more closely at the Heirloom Documentation
Tools, I think they might be the best all-round replacement for GNU
Troff in NetBSD:
http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html
They're already ported and running on NetBSD. They are much better
supported than the DWB-3.3 release and already include UTF-8 support.
They're possibly even better supported than the Plan 9 version.
--
Greg A. Woods
Planix, Inc.
<woods%planix.com@localhost> +1 416 489-5852 http://www.planix.com/
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