This is unfinished software. It has deficiencies. It also has uses. The idea is to convert a WriteNow document to troff source. Usage is: wn [-n] [-v] document.wn Troff source (no macro package) is produced on stdout. The -n option uses a character translation table that should work with the NeXT version of WriteNow; without -n, wn assumes it is dealing with a Macintosh document (the Macintosh translation table is lifted with thanks from mw2troff by Michael Caplinger and Van Jacobson; the NeXT table is derived from the Macintosh table). The -v option makes wn a little chattier. The output, once run through troff, looks very much like the WriteNow original. Run through nroff, it's a reasonable way to read WriteNow documents at an ascii terminal. It has the following deficiencies: 1. It elides pictures. 2. It ignores footnotes. 3. It ignores headers and footers (though it does leave room for them). 4. Font handling in troff is a little tough. You will want to edit the font table in roff.c (FontTable). 5. There might be a comment somewhere in the code, by accident. 6. There is no manual page. 7. The NeXT translation table hasn't been thoroughly debugged. 8. It occasionally puts tab stops in the wrong spot. 9. The troff it produces is (to put it mildly) unpleasant to edit by hand. In short, it is a hack. I use it to produce manual pages (be sure to remove the header and footer traps by hand from the 'roff output), and other documentation that requires troff format. The software works on the few bsd-style UNIX machines I've tried it on.
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.