Hacking around with RISC OS cawf again...
A thing about cawf that annoys me (iirc was inherited from nroff) is that it uses the TERM environment variable to select a printer specific init file, but also wants the -d device option to select the specific printer.
This is very annoying under modern UNIX, as TERM is often rather more complex than just "ansi" or whatever.
But RISC OS uses the hell out of environment variables! So now cawf looks for CAWF$TERM like a proper RO app!
This is actually the problem that led me to porting cawf to RISC OS in the first place. I thought I could just pull file.1 from the source, run it through a local nroff, and be done
but there doesnt seem to be a modern-ish *roff ported to 32bit RISC OS... (hence cawf)
and file.1 has to be built anyway...
and even after i got a file.1 cawf can't handle the newer -man or -mdoc macros it uses anyway! (i forget which its wrtiien in)
The RISC OS software I've been working on:
These are all compiled for 32-bit RISC OS, using RO 5.28 and DDE 28 on a Raspberry Pi2 All include full source.
http://www.sdc.org/~goosey/riscos/cawf410-2020-12-13.zip
http://www.sdc.org/~goosey/riscos/epson2ps-2020-12-13.zip
http://www.sdc.org/~goosey/riscos/moontool327-20201217.zip
Ok, I'm pretty sure cawf 4.10 is the last version of cawf. It's from 1996. The minix version I was playing with earlier is either 4.8 or 4.9.
(groff released in '97, pretty much made cawf pointless)
It was an easy port to RISC OS. I have a little bit of packaging to do yet but it's basically done.
Unfortunately it still can't deal with mandoc or mdoc manpages.
cawf-minix fails on modern man pages. Mostly because cawf's man macros are all UPPER CASE and modern macros are Mixed Case 🤐
I suspect porting modern C source would still be easier than hacking around in the nroff macros.
grr i just want to look at man pages!
Willard Goosey