Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!phri!manhat!mancol!marob!samperi
From: samperi@marob.MASA.COM (Dominick Samperi)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: TeX with System V, LaserJet+ ?
Message-ID: <276@marob.MASA.COM>
Date: 7 May 88 15:25:52 GMT
References: <394@pan.UUCP>
Reply-To: samperi@marob.UUCP (Dominick Samperi)
Organization: 18th Street Construction Co NY NY
Lines: 43
Keywords: easy?  hard?  impossible?

In article <394@pan.UUCP> jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson) writes:
|>- How easy/difficult is it to bring up [TeX] a stock System V machine, with no
|>  source license and no Pascal compiler at all?  I've seen WEB-to-C mentioned

I just brought up Common TeX 2.9 on a 3b2/400 (without the device drivers, so
the .dvi files cannot be processed on the 3b2 yet). The code is written
entirely in C (by Pat Monardo at Berkeley), and compiled smoothly after
a rather large switch statement in eval.c was broken up into two switch
statements. (The code comes with no documentation, but Donald Knuth's
book, "TeX: The Program, is very helpful.

I suspect that there is another (perhaps two other?) version(s) of
TeX written in C, since several posters here have said that they were
able to compile "CTeX 2.9" under MSDOS, and even Microport, by using the
"header file in the MSDOS directory". My version includes no MSDOS directory,
and when I compiled it under MSDOS (using Microsoft C), the resulting
executable file was too big to run (about 950K!). Furthermore, the version
I have includes several references to integer values that cannot be stored
in a 16-bit word (see par.c, for example), so porting to a 16-bit machine
will require a few changes.

Has anyone had any experience implementing TeX device drivers under UNIX
System V?

--
Dominick Samperi, Manhattan College, NYC
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