26 Jul
2020
26 Jul
'20
10:15 p.m.
psroff was part of the Transcript FWIW. It was the moral equi to the UCB
command vtroff which did the call to troff -t ... | vcat
BTW: I just peeked, on Disk 4 of Kirk's archives are the source to both
ditroff and Adobe's transcript in the 'local' directory.
I would suggest starting with transcript, copying to your system and typing
'make'
That will allow the BSD troff stuff to 'just work' us pscat/psroff/enscript
et al.
This is how most sites that did not spring for a ditroff license worked
with their Apple Laserwriters or later PS printers.
Then if you want to do the same thing with ditroff, that should 'just
compile' and build and you replace troff with ditroff.
On Sun, Jul 26, 2020 at 11:38 AM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
Some web searching turns up something called
'psroff' from the late 80s
or so that will convert C/A/T to postscript. Google 'psroff source' and
you should find something you can use.
Arnold
arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
My questions:
1. Is there a troff to postcript conversion utility present in a stock
2.11 system (or even patch level 4xx system)?
Troff from that era was designed to drive the C/A/T phototypesetter.
There were tools that converted from C/A/T to postscript but they
were mostly commercial IIRC.
2. Is there a way to build postscript directly on
the system?
Likely not.
3. Is there an alternative modern way to get to
ps or pdf output from
the nroff/troff that 2.11 has?
I would recommend tar-ing up the doc and macros, moving them to Linux
or other modern system, and using groff -C to create postscript/pdf.
That really will be the fastest way.
Arnold