On Mon, Dec 20, 2021 at 8:24 PM erpicht
wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> As a refresher, NRO is the FreeDOS version of the Unix troff
> program. My question: does anyone know of any NRO macro sets?
> Most interesting to me would be ones that could generate a
> table of contents or place footnotes. Additionally, if anyone
> has ever implemented anything similar to the eqn, tbl, or grap
> preprocessing options, even partially, I would be curious to
> see it.
*Correction: NRO is an implementation of nroff, not troff.
We included NRO since at least FreeDOS Alpha 5. Steffan updated the
version of NRO from Dave's Micro-C compiler. At the time, the idea was
that NRO would help developers to create "man" pages. We had a similar
implementation of Unix "man" at the time (a very basic FreeDOS Help
system that displayed the contents of a file from a specific dir tree)
so it seemed a good idea to include an nroff implementation. This was
probably buffered by the fact that at university, I developed a
fondness for document typesetting on Unix, including both LaTeX and
nroff/troff. So I probably wanted to duplicate that on FreeDOS. :-)
If you look at freedos/files/util/unix/nroff on Ibiblio, the
nro-120.zip source archive contains an "an" file ("-man" macros) and
an "an.fd" file (specific to FreeDOS, you'll note that the ".he"
request prints "Free-DOS Alpha 5 release" in the header
automatically). There's also an "nro.nro" file that contains the "man"
page for NRO.
But the version of NRO we include in FreeDOS now doesn't have the
macro files. For reference, I've included the output of 'unzip -l
nro.zip' at the end of this email.
We don't use "man" as our Help system anymore. And since we don't
include any macro sets with NRO, I don't think NRO has much practical
value these days. This might be a package to remove as we look to 1.3
"final." Not for any licensing concerns, but because it's of very
limited use. Interesting historically, but not practically.
To answer your question about macro sets, I've always been fond of the
"-me" macro sets. I wrote a brief article about "-me" for
Opensource.com:
https://opensource.com/article/18/2/how-format-academic-papers-linux-groff-me
Of all the nroff/troff macro sets, "-me" is my favorite. It is fairly
simple yet flexible, and worked well to write papers with it at
university in the 1990s. I also wrote with the "-ms" macros, but found
"-me" easier to use because the macro requests were lowercase, so I
didn't have to keep hitting the Shift key to type a macro request -
something you need to do pretty often in nroff/troff.
I don't know where to get macro sets, other than the "-man" macro set
from the original on Ibiblio. You can try the macro sets from groff
that Rugxulo suggested, but my guess is those will be specific to
groff capability, and may not work with a generic nroff processor like
NRO.
Jim
** Here's the output of 'unzip -l nro.zip'
Archive: nro.zip
Length DateTimeName
- -- -
0 11-18-2021 17:32 APPINFO/
147 11-18-2021 17:32 APPINFO/NRO.DE
156 11-18-2021 17:32 APPINFO/NRO.FR
550 11-18-2021 14:52 APPINFO/NRO.LSM
155 11-18-2021 17:32 APPINFO/NRO.TR
0 06-27-1995 21:00 BIN/
14573 06-27-1995 21:00 BIN/NRO.COM
0 06-28-1995 01:00 HELP/
13747 06-28-1995 01:00 HELP/NRO
0 12-08-2021 11:33 SOURCE/
0 12-08-2021 11:33 SOURCE/NRO/
30701 01-26-1997 21:48 SOURCE/NRO/SOURCES.ZIP
- ---
60029 12 files
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