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From: wcs@ho95e.UUCP (Bill.Stewart.4K435.x0705)
Newsgroups: net.wanted
Subject: Re: stripped down nroff out there anywhere
Message-ID: <248@ho95e.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 12-Nov-85 21:08:48 EST
Article-I.D.: ho95e.248
Posted: Tue Nov 12 21:08:48 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 13-Nov-85 21:32:14 EST
References: <673@cal-unix>
Reply-To: wcs@ho95e.UUCP (Bill Stewart ( 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcs ))
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ
Lines: 24
Keywords: nroff cpu-hog
Summary: You want "sroff", or a 68000 box

In article <673@cal-unix> ptseg@cal-uni.UUCP (Peter Thaggard) writes:
>
>We are running 4.1 UNIX on a VAX 11/750; .....
>.... I found that there are at most five nroff commands that are used(i.e.
>.bp, .nf, .ce) in 99.9% of the documents.  Does anyone out there have a
>stripped-down version of nroff that only implements the....

AT&T sells (I think as part of the Documenter's Workbench?) a product called
"sroff".  It's about 10 times as fast as nroff; if you include the mm macro
package it slows down to 3 times as fast.  The mm stuff is compatible;
the macro facility is more limited, and it doesn't handle eqn or troff.  But
it's fast, and even runs on MS-DOS PCs.

As an alternative, consider getting a cheap 68000-based UNIX machine, and
having it just do nroff.  You can get them for as low as about $4000
and they can be almost as fast as a 750 (i.e. still slow, but you don't care.)
We have an internal product which is a 68000 board with 750K memory and a small
PROM monitor that knows how to download n/troff and process jobs.  It's a
single-process machine, but there's almost no overhead, so it's only limited by
communications bandwidth, and it does a good job of offloading the main CPU.
Avalon builds a similar board that plugs into a UNIBUS; it costs more but does
more.
-- 
## Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcs