[rescue] My Best Rescue to Date.. Ever

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Devin L. Ganger wrote:

> If he's talking about what I think he's talking about, a lot of the new 
> Linux (and *BSD pages, for that matter) are written using an alternative 
> set of troff macros that don't play well with the macros that are used 
> by pretty much every real UNIX distro for, oh, ages.

Um, no, you are incorrect.

Only UNIX(TM) systems are allowed to ship nroff and troff.

All other UNIX systems (including the BSD systems and non-UNIX systems) 
have to ship an alternative.

groff is what most of them use, and it was designed to replace troff, 
and emulate nroff and get as close as possible to the "real thing".

groff is a totally new program, with different internal data structures, 
and quite a few improvements over troff.

That means a lot of macros had to be rewritten.  There are also legal 
issues that affect compatibility.

The goal of the groff macros are to get as close as possible to the 
output generated if you were using the "real" UNIX typesetters.

All things considered, I would say that groff does a very good job of 
providing an nroff/troff alternative to non UNIX(TM) systems.