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From: guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: Re: AT&T and the 3B*2: FLAME!
Message-ID: <2037@rlgvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 27-Jun-84 02:13:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: rlgvax.2037
Posted: Wed Jun 27 02:13:04 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 22-Jun-84 07:33:44 EDT
References: <356@qtlon.UUCP> <800003@ea.UUCP>
Organization: CCI Office Systems Group, Reston, VA
Lines: 37

> If AT&T switches to the Berkeley flavored man, with everything pre-formated,
> then they won't even need nroff/ditroff.

In System V Release 2, they did.  The pre-formatted stuff is Huffman-coded
with "pack(1)", so it shaves the disk space requirements by ~30%, and even
with the Huffman-decoding it probably beats the living **** out of nroff,
given the CPU resources nroff demands.

> Of course, not giving you man at all would have the same effect.

Some systems are forced to do that; they don't have enough disk space for
on-line manual pages and software and user disk files.

> I've got nroff/troff, and I can't get people to use it. They want a WYSIWYG
> (what you see is what you get) word processor. Ever tried to find a wp
> with the power of troff?

Try the (probably expensive) Interleaf Office Publishing System, which
is offered on the SUN and will be offered on the Cadmus workstations.
It requires expensive hardware (bit-mapped display) and probably requires
lots of address space, but from what I've seen it'll do everything that
nroff/troff does and better.  It supports multiple fonts, multiple type
sizes, floating footnotes (and it reformats paragraphs and repaginates *as
you type*, and keeps up with fast typing!), data-driven graphs, and free-form
drawing.  It uses a "structured document" approach probably closer to Scribe
than to nroff/troff.  WYSIWYG editors are infinitely easier to use than
nroff/troff (no d*mn edit/format/check/edit/format/check cycle, or at least
a much shorter one).  We've got one here that does most of what you'd want
nroff (sic - it doesn't do typesetting) to do, and people here use nroff only
when they've got a document in nroff form already.

Actually, the great 3B2/UNIX unbundling discussion really doesn't belong
in net.arch; it's also being carried on in net.micro (best place) and
net.followup (better than net.micro but still not 100% appropriate).

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy