SUMMARY: Producing PostScript from troff

From: Michael H. Morse (mmorse@z.nsf.gov)
Date: Sun Nov 22 1992 - 13:08:57 CST


Thanks to all who replied, and my apologies (sincere) to the
sun-manager purists whom I offended. In retrospect, I should at least
have consulted some of the indexed archives of this list. This subject
(PostScript prodution) has been well covered on this list and others.

This from a previous summary:

> From: rwolf@dretor.dciem.dnd.ca
> Subject: SUMMARY: Troff to Postscript Translators
>
> Newsprint is seems to be a good bug-free solution but the following
> public domain alternatives were the most popular:
>
> GNU's groff
> Chris Lewis's psroff-3.0
> pscat
> cat2ps
> thack
> troff2ps
>
> Almost half of the replies were in favour of GNU's groff. Plus everyone
> says that it works great and better than Newsprint.

My responses were also heavily in favor of groff, with the others
mentioned in about the same frequency.

Several people mentioned Transcript. I called Sun, and they no longer
sell Transcript (and it was too expensive for my application anyway),
and instead sell NewsPrint (it's around $600, according to Sun, "half
the price of Transcript"). The people who mentioned NewsPrint seemed
quite happy with it.

Several people sent me the faq from the comp.text newsgroup, which has
a lot of good information about troff and C/A/T output and how the
whole thing works. Recommended reading.

Given the ground swell of opinion for groff, I started to install Gnu
C++. Half a day later, I decided it wasn't worth it for the modest
amount of troff I do, and switched to psroff. I had a single compile
error, fixed it, and it seems to work fine (I didn't install the
patches, so I shouldn't really complain about the compile error
either). (For the record, I got one response that was critical of
psroff.)

My recommendation: If you already have GNU c++, by all means use
Groff. Otherwise, psroff seems to be highly competent, and does the
job.

Thanks again to all that replied.

--Mike



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