Speedup idea for troff/nroff

[John Mashey]

In article <387 at ivax.doc.ic.ac.uk> lmjm at doc.ic.ac.uk (Lee McLoughlin) writes:
>This is a speedup idea for troff and its relatives .....
>
>Most of the local use of troff is with a few standard packages (man,
>ms, me).  Would it be possible to use the unexec routine to create a
>preloaded version by running troff to read in the macro package
>then unexecing itself out?  (Unexec is a routine which creates an
>a.out equivalent to the current running program.)  ...

the nroff/troff of System V have done this for many years: one command
lets you create a file that has all of the necessary state information,
normally after the unchanging part of the macro package has been processed.
Then, invoking {n|t}roff -cx gets the "compressed" form of the macro package.
I think Fred Dalrymple did this [but somebody correct me if I'm wrong, it's been
a long time.]
-- 
-john mashey	DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak for me only, etc>
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