Re: groff alternative?

Emanuel.strobl_at_gmx.net (Emanuel Strobl) wrote:

> Am Freitag, 17. Juni 2005 21:23 schrieb David O'Brien:
> > Yes.  But the issue is, why trade one piece of non-BSDL licensed code
> > for another non-BSDL licensed piece of code??  What does changing from
> > Groff to Solaris Troff actually buy us??  Groff is the standard in Roff.
> Groff depends on c++ and is far to big for embedded systems. In fact its 
> bigger than the complete man pages for the OS. (~10MB).
> That's why I initially posted my question and Lyndon made the OpenSolaris 
> suggestion. I'd like to have a simple possibility to view unformated man 
> pages with reasonable sized tools. Preformatting man pages is not an 
> option for me since packages install unformatted man pages and I don't 
> know a suitable way to change that.

For anyone interested, I have created a portable and enhanced version
of OpenSolaris nroff/troff available at
<http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html>.

Regarding the issues mentioned on this list in June,

- it can be put in a very small package as only the nroff and tbl
  binaries and the macro packages are required for formatting manual
  pages to view them on a terminal. This fits in approximately 250 KB
  of disk space on an i386 system. (A full installation requires
  approximately 2.3 MB.)

- while not being compatible with groff in general, it supports long
  request names and similar features that occur in many manual pages
  today

- it can handle locale-specific characters, and can create UTF-8 output

- the text block limit in tbl does not prevent the ncurses terminfo
  page from being formatted correctly anymore.

Many other enhancements for quality typesetting with troff have also
been made.

The "doc" macro package is currently included in its plain 4.4BSD
version and does not format current BSD manual pages correctly. A
contribution of an updated variant would be welcome.

	Gunnar