[TUHS] Re: Old troff files (1988-2007)

[Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@gmail.com>]

Jacobson, Doug W:

> Long  story short, I have a unpublished manuscript that a fac-
> ulty member in my department wrote late 1980's  early  2000's.
> He  did  the entire thing in troff, eqn, and pic.  The faculty
> member is still alive.   A  publisher  is  interested  in  the
> manuscript.  I have all of the source files on an old unix ma-
> chine that still has troff, eqn and pic.  It also has groff.

*roff has so spectacular a backwards compatibiliy that its  mod-
ern  implementaions will not only accept a source from the 1970s
but actually produce a historically accurate  rendition  of  it.
Unlike  MS  Word,  *roff  the kind of software that you need not
bother to keep an old version to open your old files.

I therefore suggest that you install a modern *roff and seek as-
sistance with your task in its community.  GNU Troff is the only
one I know and use (even for this e-mail), can recommend it  for
both  hard (the program itself) and soft (the friendly community
and great maintaner) qualities.  They are  also  interested  and
successful  in  recreating  historial documents, so feel free to
ask in their mailing list.