Branden. Thank you. FWIW I have generally found heirloom to be good enough for rendering most old troff on modern systems such that I can reasonably read the text. But I suspect your detail is useful to know in some cases. As they say YMMR. That said I often use the groff tools kits since it’s what comes with things like brew on my Mac but it burps on certain macros, particularly when I want to render old man pages or doc files from old Unix versions with things like .UX macro (which is a PITA).
Thanks again, Clem Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual On Fri, Oct 4, 2024 at 8:14 PM G. Branden Robinson < g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Doug, > > At 2024-10-04T21:42:50+0000, Jacobson, Doug W [E CPE] via TUHS wrote: > > Folks: > > > > Long story short, I have a unpublished manuscript that a faculty > > member in my department wrote late 1980's early 2000's. He did the > > entire thing in troff, eqn, and pic. The faculty member is still > > alive. A publisher is interested in the manuscript. I have all of > > the source files on an old unix machine that still has troff, eqn and > > pic. It also has groff. This issue is that the pic commands are > > bracketed by .G1 and .G2 not .PS & .PE. > > As others noted, those are the characteristic preprocessor tokens used > by grap(1). > > groff(1) says: > A free implementation of the grap preprocessor, written by Ted > Faber ⟨fa...@lunabase.org⟩, can be found at the grap website > ⟨http://www.lunabase.org/~faber/Vault/software/grap/⟩. groff > supports only this grap. > > Distributors often have a package of Faber's grap. I'm not aware of any > other in circulation. (Happy to be corrected here.) > > Please contact the groff list, groff at gnu dot org, if you have any > problems using it to format these documents and/or to note formatting > discrepancies between Unix troff and groff. There will likely be some. > > I've noted differences between DWB troff and Heirloom troff, so using > the latter does not guarantee identical rendering, and moreover > DWB/System V troff has some bugs/limitations that Heirloom and/or GNU > troffs have fixed, and some of these can affect formatting. > > Here's a list from groff's tbl(1) man page, for example. > > GNU tbl enhancements > In addition to extensions noted above, GNU tbl removes constraints > endured by users of AT&T tbl. > > • Region options can be specified in any lettercase. > > • There is no limit on the number of columns in a table, > regardless of their classification, nor any limit on the number > of text blocks. > > • All table rows are considered when deciding column widths, not > just those occurring in the first 200 input lines of a region. > Similarly, table continuation (.T&) tokens are recognized > outside a region’s first 200 input lines. > > • Numeric and alphabetic entries may appear in the same column. > > • Numeric and alphabetic entries may span horizontally. > > One can imagine how a 200+-row table could format differently between > DWB/System V and GNU tbl, without either being "wrong". > > Regards, > Branden >
