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From: Lars Poulsen 
Newsgroups: net.unix
Subject: Choosing a Documant Preparation Package
Message-ID: <6960@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 3-Jan-85 18:35:59 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.6960
Posted: Thu Jan  3 18:35:59 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Jan-85 23:44:48 EST
Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab
Lines: 34

I do most of my work in three somewhat distinct environments:

	- VAX/VMS (Vanilla 3.7)
	- TWG Eunice (3.2)
	- 4.2 BSD Unix

After a period of trying to use native tools in each environment,
I have more or less given up on EDT and I now stick to VI on any
system that has it. (Has anybody written a VI emulator for TPU ?)

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Next, I have to come to terms with text formatters; it looks like
I am going to have to live without the real nice ones (which I hear
are SCRIBE and TEX) and make do with RUNOFF (DSR) and NROFF/DITROFF.

Ideally, I'd like to have a compatible subset; it looks like it 
oughta be possible to write a DSR emulation in NROFF (provided
you stick to the two-letter versions of the commands), but I
definitely wouldn't want to build it myself. Has anyone done it ?

Our in-house systems support group hacked up a package which I
don't happen to like much, and then they say that if you want
something else (or more) you should use -ms (or was it -me ?).
Not that they'd really support it, of course. Also the inhouse
package cannot be loaded together with -me or -ms.

What do other people do ?
For system managers, how do you overcome the learning/documentation
barrier of nroff ?

			/ Lars Poulsen
			 
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