Message-Id:	<200006251527.LAA08082@delorie.com>
Date:	Sun, 25 Jun 2000 10:38:32 +0300 (IDT)
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
X-Sender:	eliz AT is
To:	djgpp-announce AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	ANNOUNCE: DJGPP port of Groff 1.16 uploaded
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About a month ago, I wrote, when I announced the port of Groff 1.15:

  Ironically, the new version 1.16 of Groff was just released the other 
  day.  It is a large step forward, with many changes; retrofitting the 
  DJGPP-specific patches into it would delay the release of this port for 
  too much.

Well, it turned out that I lied: the retrofit was quite an easy task.  
And I also found a few minor bugs in the distribution of the ported
Groff 1.15, while I was at that ;-)

So: This is to announce that the DJGPP port of version 1.16 of the
Groff package is available from SimTel.NET mirrors worldwide:

 ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2gnu/gro116b.zip
 ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2gnu/gro116s.zip

Groff is a document-formatting and typesetting package.  It belongs to an 
older generation of word-processing software that is not WYSIWYG; 
instead, you edit the document source with a text editor, intersperse the 
text with special directives that specify fonts and formatting 
parameters, and then submit the source to a batch processor which produces 
a ready-to-print or ready-to-read document.  troff, a program that is 
standard on Unix, is used, even today, to write manual pages (those *.1 
files you find in the man subdirectory of the DJGPP installation tree), 
but it can also be used for writing very large and complex documents.
(Another, more modern program from the family of batch word-processors is 
TeX.)

The DJGPP port of Groff is mainly used to format man pages.  However, if 
you are interested in typesetting and word processing, you will find in 
Groff a wealth of useful information and algorithms.  In particular, this 
is one of the few GNU packages (perhaps even the only one) which is 
written in C++.

Groff includes the GNU implementation of the Unix-standard utilities
troff and nroff, and their companions pic, eqn, tbl, soelim, and 
others.  It also includes many macro packages, including man, the 
package of macros for formatting man pages.

The main user-level change in this release are the additions of the HTML 
driver, which means you can now easily produce man pages in HTML format;
a new preprocessor `grn' for gremlin pictures; and a `grolbp' driver for 
Canon LBP-6/8 series laser printers.

A bug in the Postscript driver, whereby Groff would print an error 
message when invoked with the -Tps switch, is solved in this port.  See 
the file NEWS in the distribution for the full list of changes.

Last, but not least, the Groff maintainer accepted my patches, so with 
any luck, future Groff releases will support DJGPP right out of the
box.

Please direct any further discussions about this port to 
comp.os.msdos.djgpp news group (or write to its e-mail gateway 
djgpp AT delorie DOT com).

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