Message-Id: <200006251527.LAA08082@delorie.com> Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 10:38:32 +0300 (IDT) From: Eli Zaretskii X-Sender: eliz AT is To: djgpp-announce AT delorie DOT com Subject: ANNOUNCE: DJGPP port of Groff 1.16 uploaded In-Reply-To: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp-announce AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk 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).