17 Oct
2024
17 Oct
'24
3:40 a.m.
Jacobson, Doug W:
Long story short, I have a unpublished manuscript
that a fac-
ulty 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 ma-
chine that still has troff, eqn and pic. It also has groff.
*roff has so spectacular a backwards compatibiliy that its mod-
ern implementaions will not only accept a source from the 1970s
but actually produce a historically accurate rendition of it.
Unlike MS Word, *roff the kind of software that you need not
bother to keep an old version to open your old files.
I therefore suggest that you install a modern *roff and seek as-
sistance with your task in its community. GNU Troff is the only
one I know and use (even for this e-mail), can recommend it for
both hard (the program itself) and soft (the friendly community
and great maintaner) qualities. They are also interested and
successful in recreating historial documents, so feel free to
ask in their mailing list.