This is troff in view mode; [Up]
Date: Sun 03-Nov-1990 22:58:12 From: john@csrnxt1.ae.utexas.edu (John R. Schutz) Subject: troff (Typesetter busy) whenever I try to use troff, it always reports 'typesetter busy'. There is no one else on the system. Any ideas? john
Date: Sun 05-Nov-1990 01:08:00 From: eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) Subject: Re: troff (Typesetter busy) In article <john.657673092@csrnxt1.ae.utexas.edu> john@csrnxt1.ae.utexas.edu (John R. Schutz) writes: >whenever I try to use troff, it always reports 'typesetter busy'. There >is no one else on the system. Any ideas? troff on the NeXT is the "old" C/A/T troff (as opposed to DWB or ditroff). troff with no options looks for /dev/cat, which, of course, it doesn't find. Hence, troff is only useful with either the -t (C/A/T codes to stdout) or -a (ASCII trace) options. The error message, while confusing, is one of the few remaining vestiges of "traditional" UNIX, and worthy of historical preservation. More likely, what you really wanted was ptroff, which is part of the bundled Adobe TRANSCRIPT package. ptroff with no options outputs to the NeXT laser printer. With the -t option, it outputs PostScript to stdout, which you can redirect to a disk file and examine with the Preview application. -=EPS=-
Date: Sun 05-Nov-1990 02:36:29 From: geoff@ITcorp.com (Geoff Kuenning) Subject: Re: troff (Typesetter busy) In article <john.657673092@csrnxt1.ae.utexas.edu> john@csrnxt1.ae.utexas.edu (John R. Schutz) writes: > whenever I try to use troff, it always reports 'typesetter busy'. There > is no one else on the system. Any ideas? By default, troff tries to use the C/A/T typesetter which was once attached to some Unix machine at Bell Labs. If you use "troff -t", the C/A/T typecodes are written to standard output, which is somewhat more useful but still not very handy. However, if you use "troff -t ... | pscat" or "troff -t ... | pscat -x72" (you'll have to experiment to see which works), you'll get Postscript written to stdout. Pipe that into lpr, and you'll get nice results. There are also some scripts which do this, named "ptroff" and "psroff". One works on the Next, the other doesn't. Both take switches just like troff and put the output to the printer (well, they would if they both worked). The method taken from the paragraph above is from one of my makefiles and is thus guaranteed to work. (Terms of guarantee: if I'm wrong, I'll send you a piece of stale Halloween candy :-)
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