Problems with troff output on a laser printer

[Chip Rosenthal]

In article <2984 at hsi86.hsi.com> rao at hsi86.hsi.com (Ananth Rao) writes:
>Has anyone got 'troff' to work with a laser printer, specifically the
>HP Laserjet III?  

Yes...and they tend to use Chris Lewis' psroff to do so.  Trying to
redirect C/A/T typesetter commands to your LaserJet is about as productive
as sending PCL commands to a plotter.  You need something which converts
the C/A/T codes into something the device understands, and psroff does
this.  Note that this is a nontrivial operation -- it's more than just
translating a raw byte stream.  The typesetter needs some sort of knowledge
of the target device (in particular the font widths) to produce reasonable
output.

Other things to look into...

    - If you've got g++, you might want to look into groff.  I've
      heard good things about it - but have no first hand experience.

    - If you get your hands on a vanilla DWB, such as the one Interactive
      distributes, it is quite usable with `jetroff' as the backend.  The
      main difficulty is that ISC distributes on filesystem floppies, so
      you will need access to a SysV/386 machine to unload the stuff.  Also,
      I ran all the executables through `coffconv' to make them x.out formats
      (which in retrospect I'm not sure is required), and they all ran fine
      except for `pic' which dumped core.

    - Myself, I'm using Elan's eroff which is a pricey but solid package.
      Even though it includes LaserJet support, I ended up chucking it
      and using `jetroff' as the backend.  Jetroff is so much superior
      and flexible.

    - There are other third party DWB's ranging from the inexpensive
      (e.g. Leverage) to pricey (e.g. Xroff).

I wish I had some good things to say about psroff - but the simple fact
of the matter is that I haven't used it.  On paper, it looks exactly like
what you need, and Chris is active in supporting the package.  You should
be able to find it at a comp.sources.unix archive site.  Patches have
been released to comp.sources.bugs.
-- 
Chip Rosenthal  512-482-8260  |  If software look-and-feel can be protected,
Unicom Systems Development    |  then I'd like to claim a copyright upon
<chip at chinacat.Unicom.COM>    |  `Memory fault - core dumped'.