software tools question

[Henry McGilton -- Software Products]

In article <14720 at boulder.Colorado.EDU>, skwu at boulder.Colorado.EDU (WU SHI-KUEI) writes:
    *  With System V by far the easiest solution to including
    *  a table in multiple documents is to process the table
    *  source with 'tbl', redirecting the output to a file
    *  which can be included anywhere.  I.e.:

	    tbl table1.src > table1.fmt
	    tbl table2.src > table2.fmt

There are some minor (possibly major) problems with this approach:

    o   if your source has grap or pic programs, you must
	then preprocess the stuff using those programs first:

	    grap table1.src | pic | tbl > table1.fmt

    o   if your source has equations, you must
	then process the stuff using eqn as well:

	    grap table1.src | pic | tbl | eqn > table1.fmt

This leads to a couple of problems:

    1.  you use a lot more disk space keeping all
	the intermediate forms of the stuff around.
	The expansion factor through tbl and eqn can
	be around 10 to 1.

    2.  time after time after time I've seen neophyte
	users do exactly this process, followed by removing
	the original sources.  They don't understand that
	it's a one-way process, and that getting from
	expanded tbl output back to a tbl description is
	hard work.

    *  There is no need for any other software tools (At least
    *  with 'mm' or any of the other System V text formatting tools).

soelim or one of its clones is a safer answer.

	............. Henry
+------------------+------------------------+---------------------------+
| Henry McGilton   | I saw the future,      | arpa: hmcgilton at sun.com   |
| Sun Microsystems | and it didn't work.    | uucp: ...!sun!angel!henry |
| Mt. View, CA     |                        |                           |
+------------------+------------------------+---------------------------+